Took to my bed today and got nothing accomplished but rest. So needed it.
Back tomorrow.
The Climate Case of the Century
1 hour ago
Politics And One Mother With A Keyboard. Because in front of every informed voter is a frightened politician.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
"The truth is that Arizona has been a state with far-right politics going back many years, but in [the] last weeks and months is an even more remarkable lurch to right," says Mark Potok, Director of the intelligence project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups. "You've got a lot of whites moving into the state who are not from there, and who seem to feel this is a white man's state, and who don't like it when they find more diversity than they expected."What? Where are you getting that information because it sounds like it came from the Library of Your Ass.
Immigrant activist Kat Rodriguez moved to Arizona in 2000 and says even she, a Texan, is stunned by Arizona's shift to the right.
"For the last five to seven years, this state seems to have been attracting the xenophobic and evenly openly racist groups of people,"says the Tucson-based coordinator for Derechos Humanos.
The deeper problem, say some, is that the drawing of state legislative districts empowers the extremes of the political right.Mr. Quinlan seems to be complete ignorant of fundamental politics, the political history of gerrymandering, and unless Arizona bars them, the usefulness of referendums.
"The biggest driver of this from my perspective is that Arizona districts are currently drawn so that they are not competitive," says Farrell Quinlan, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small business owners. Only 20 percent of both parties show up for primaries, so candidates have to appeal to the most faithful and ideologically pure, he says. "The districts are set up in ways that push politicians to the most irreconcilable positions – that filters down to the kinds of laws that you have coming out of here right now," says Quinlan.
When your breakfast plate doesn't pack the same wallop that it used to and your pappardelle con prosciutto goes from larapin to blase, remember why. It's because you can't be trusted to use high-sodium food responsibly.
Do-gooder groups are thrilled because after decades of failing to scare people off salt, the government will simply turn it into a controlled substance. They claim that thousands of lives will be saved from decreased incidence of high blood pressure and hail the move as a blow against Big Food.
More likely, Big Food will be able to use the regulations they help design to dominate the market even more. They are already spending millions to find new chemical compounds that keep the foods yummy but skirt the new sodium prohibition.
The local potato chip maker whose greasy treats taste divine will find that they can't afford Frito Lay's Space Age salt substitute. Mom and Pop will have to sell chips that taste like a fried dishrag and eventually close.
But they will be casualties in a larger war that doesn't have as much to do with salt or wellness or even obesity.
The regulatory battleground of the decades to come is going to be your body. How much sugar, salt, fat and everything else you put in your body will be a matter of great federal interest.
Barring the success of lawsuits or huge gains by Republicans this fall, the president's health program will be imposed in pieces over the next four years. By the end, the government will have a fiduciary interest in the waistlines and cholesterol counts of every American.
As the most unaffordable aspects of the Obama plan come on line, expect more dietary restrictions as the government looks for ways to control the enormous costs related to unhealthy habits.
For decades, insurance companies have tried to get their customers to quit drinking and smoking and to slim down and exercise.
But imagine what they could have done if they had the power to simply outlaw behavior that drove up costs.
Taking away your bacon will be deemed a small price for helping cover the Obamacare deficit.
America’s prosperity not only created pollution, but the wealth and institutions of technological innovation that enabled the country to address the problems caused by pollution. The 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of technocratic centralized planning, and so top-down regulatory schemes were preferred by politicians. The success in reducing air and water pollution shows that top-down regulatory schemes can work. However, environmental regulations are costly. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Resources for the Future, estimated in 2003 that the United States spent roughly 2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on environmental protection. That’s about $280 billion per year. That figure matches up with one generated by a free-market think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which estimated in 2009 that environmental regulatory costs came to $236 billion per year.May I suggest this for a change? How To Annoy A Liberal on Earth Day.
Here's something that would really annoy the current White House crowd if it paid attention to public opinion polls, which of course it doesn't, being so focused on doing what's right for the American people. But by far the best fifth-quarter presidential job approval in modern history was George W. Bush's 79.5%.Emphasis mine.