April 27, 2012

Romney’s Advice To Students: Borrow Money From Your Parents

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Apr 27, 2012 at 4:08 pm


If you’re young and you want to start your own business, Mitt Romney’s has some advice from you: Borrow money from your parents. At a “lecture” for students at Otterbein University in Ohio today, Mitt Romney told students that, his friend, Jimmy John, started a business by borrowing $20,000 from his parents at a low interest rate. Romney suggested anyone in the audience could do the same:


This kind of devisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

Watch it:

Poll: Is this guy really electable in the USA ?

April 27, 2012

Ex-aide says he worried Edwards might snuff him

(CBS/AP) A former aide to presidential candidate John Edwards says he felt in danger during a back road meeting where he asked Edwards to tell the truth about his mistress.


Andrew Young testified for a fifth day Friday in Edwards' trial. The former senator has denied federal charges of misusing campaign donations to hide the affair with Rielle Hunter and the fact they had a baby together.


Young claims he pretended to be the child's father and took Hunter into hiding to help Edwards.


Young said Friday he met Edwards on a rural road in 2008 to demand that Edwards tell the truth about the affair. He says Edwards drove them through a remote rural area and at one point he worried he was going to be killed.

Earlier in the trial, the prosecution had tried to plug potential holes in Young's testimony, focusing on inconsistencies such as why Young had written in his tell-all book, "The Politician," that the donations "were gifts, entirely proper, and not subject to campaign finance laws."

Young answered that, at the time, he wrote that the donations were legal for a simple reason: "I was scared to death," said Young. "I did this to cover my butt."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57423142/ex-aide-says-he-worried-edwards-might-snuff-him/


Poll: Is this guy covering his own butt or was this a real fear ?

April 27, 2012

Government-Run Healthcare is More Efficient Than Private Healthcare

Can the government provide healthcare more efficiently than the private market? There's no simple answer to that, but a couple of recent data points suggest the answer is yes.

First there's Medicare. It's true that long-term Medicare costs remain our most critical budget problem, thanks to aging baby boomers and ever-expanding treatments for chronic illnesses and end-of-life care. But per-capita Medicare spending has been on a long downward trend, and that trend has been so steady and predictable that a recent study suggested that spending growth per beneficiary over the next decade would be close to zero. Earlier this week we got some confirmation of this when the annual Social Security Trustees report was released. Most of the media attention focused on Social Security, whose financial position deteriorated compared to last year thanks to a slowing economy and an aging population. But using the same economic forecasts, the trustees nonetheless projected no deterioration in Medicare's financial picture. Why? "Once you dig into the numbers," says the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff, "the most plausible explanation is a pretty encouraging one: Our health-care system is getting better at delivering the same medicine more efficiently."

And there's more. On Wednesday, Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll reported on a new study of Medicaid spending by states. Despite years of horror stories about Medicaid bankrupting state budgets, the study found that most of the increase over the past decade has simply been due to inflation and population growth, not the rising cost of medical care. Adjusted for inflation and population, it turns out that Medicaid spending rose by less than 4% between 2002 and 2011. (That's the dotted line in the chart on the right.) Why has Medicaid done so well? The study quotes Vernon Smith, former Medicaid director for Michigan:

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/government-healthcare-more-efficient-private-healthcare


Poll: Can the Federal Government provide healthcare more efficiently ?

April 27, 2012

Collapse Of Antarctic Ice Sheet Would Likely Put Washington, D.C. Largely Underwater

University of Toronto and Oregon State University geophysicists have shown that should the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse and melt in a warming world – as many scientists are concerned it will – it is the coastlines of North America and of nations in the southern Indian Ocean that will face the greatest threats from rising sea levels.

The catastrophic increase in sea level, already projected to average between 16 and 17 feet around the world, would be almost 21 feet in such places as Washington, D.C., scientists say, putting it largely underwater. Many coastal areas would be devastated. Much of Southern Florida would disappear, according to researchers at Oregon State University.

“There is widespread concern that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be prone to collapse, resulting in a rise in global sea levels,” says geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica, who, along with physics graduate student Natalya Gomez and Oregon State University geoscientist Peter Clark, are the authors of a new study to be published in the February 6 issue of the journal Science. “We’ve been able to calculate that not only will the rise in sea levels at most coastal sites be significantly higher than previously expected, but that the sea-level change will be highly variable around the globe,” adds Gomez.

“Scientists are particularly worried about the ice sheet because it is largely marine-based, which means that the bedrock underneath most of the ice sits under sea level,” says Mitrovica, director of the Earth System Evolution Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. “The West Antarctic is fringed by ice shelves which act to stabilize the ice sheet – these shelves are sensitive to global warming, and if they break up, the ice sheet will have a lot less impediment to collapse.” This concern was reinforced further in a recent study led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington that showed that the entire region is indeed warming.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090205142132.htm


See this post for more recent information on Antartica

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101724320

April 27, 2012

Boehner on the war on women....

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/john-boeher-on-war-on-women-give-me

April 27, 2012

10 Things You Need to Know About Marco Rubio

DC is all abuzz about the wunderkind Florida senator and possible Mitt veep. But does he help Romney's flip-flop problem?

—By Adam Weinstein
| Fri Apr. 27, 2012 3:00 AM

When it comes to Veepstakes 2012, one name towers above them all: Marco Rubio. The freshman Florida senator vaulted to national prominence when he rode the tea party wave to power two years ago. Team Romney sees a lot to like in Rubio: He's Latino, young, fiercely conservative, from a battleground state, and backed by powerful political and corporate allies with names like Bush.

In recent weeks, Rubio has endorsed Romney, tagged along on the presidential campaign trail, and delivered a high-profile Brookings Institution speech calling for "a more forceful foreign policy." (Apparently, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya and sanctions on Iran and Syria aren't forceful enough.) The Rubio-a-go-go has gotten so feverish that he consistently leads all vice-presidential hopefuls among Intrade oddsmakers and has even been called "this election's Sarah Palin."

But how well do you know the fresh-faced Floridian? Turns out he's got a lot in common with Romney: He'll say anything to pander to the right, even if it contradicts what he's said before. Here are 10 facts about Rubio that might surprise you:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/ten-things-you-need-know-about-marco-rubio

April 27, 2012

Exactly, if someone is torturing you....

you will say anything to get them to stop....

April 27, 2012

Exclusive: Senate probe finds little evidence of effective "torture"

(Reuters) - A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

The backers of such techniques, which include "water-boarding," sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders.

One official said investigators found "no evidence" such enhanced interrogations played "any significant role" in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.

President Barack Obama and his aides have largely sought to avoid revisiting Bush administration controversies. But the debate over the effectiveness of enhanced interrogations, which human rights advocates condemn as torture, is resurfacing, in part thanks to a new book by a former top CIA official.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/us-usa-congress-torture-idUSBRE83Q07J20120427

April 27, 2012

Living in a world of zombie economic policies

This was the month the confidence fairy died.


For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/opinion/krugman-death-of-a-fairy-tale.html?

April 27, 2012

Today in the Senate, 31 GOP men voted NO on the Violence Against Women Act All 5 GOP women voted YES

https://twitter.com/#!/thinkprogress/status/195639436392927232/photo/1/large

and not to be hypocritical or anything like that.....

Orrin Hatch cosponsored original Violence Against Women Act in '94. He voted against reauthorization yesterday.