Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

Do they think that it will be any easier if they win the nomination, or Heaven forbid, actually become President?

From AP:

Cain, however, said he plans to “dial back” his campaign and media appearances in order to avoid missteps. Since climbing in the polls, he has had a series of fumbles, forcing him to clarify comments on abortion, immigration and terrorism suspects.

Cain has chalked up the mistakes to a grueling campaign schedule jammed with media interviews.

Romney ducks the Sunday shows By Steve Benen

“Mitt Romney… has not appeared on ,,, any Sunday talk show since March of 2010. We invited Governor Romney again this week, but his campaign says he’s still not ready to sit down for an interview.”

At first blush, this is rather surprising. Romney is supposed to be the smart one in the GOP field, able to answer questions in complete sentences and with passable grammar. He should be the last Republican candidate to be afraid of the Sunday shows.

Romney largely presents the appearance of intellectual chops, which are exaggerated by the limits of his GOP rivals. He thrives in debates because his answers must be brief and lacking in details and depth. Romney avoids lengthy press conferences, and prefers to interact with news organizations by publishing op-eds written by his staff.

And from the Huffington Post:

Mitt Romney Limits National Media Exposure by Michael Calderone

He’s avoided lengthy interviews with magazines to which he spoke in 2008 — such as Time and Newsweek

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

by Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times (emphasis added)

…Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn. “The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing… (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)**

Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street…

(A)n idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know…

**The judge, Jed Rakoff, was actually a classmate of mine at Law school, and we worked on the Law School Show together.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

It’s OK for the next 30 years, and will be fine even longer if we simply remove the salary cap on payroll taxes.

But the Washington Post doesn’t want you to know that:

Washington Post Discards All Journalistic Standards In Attack on Social Security

by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

News outlets generally like to claim a separation between their editorial pages and their news pages. The Washington Post has long ignored this distinction in pursuing its agenda for cutting Social Security, however it took a big step further in tearing down this barrier with a lead front page story that would have been excluded from most opinion pages because of all the inaccuracies it contained.

The basic premise of the story, as expressed in the headline (“the debt fallout: how Social Security went ‘cash negative’ earlier than expected”) and the first paragraph (“Last year, as a debate over the runaway national debt gathered steam in Washington, Social Security passed a treacherous milestone. It went ‘cash negative.’”) is that Social Security faces some sort of crisis because it is paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. [The "runaway national debt" is also a Washington Post invention. The deficits have soared in recent years because of the economic downturn following the collapse of the housing bubble. No responsible newspaper would discuss this as problem of the budget as opposed to a problem with a horribly underemployed economy.]

This “treacherous milestone” is entirely the Post’s invention, it has absolutely nothing to do with the law that governs Social Security benefit payments. Under the law, as long as their is money in the trust fund, then Social Security is able to pay full benefiits. There is literally no other possible interpretation of the law.

As the article notes the trust fund currently holds $2.6 trillion in government bonds, so it is nowhere close to being unable to pay benefits. The whole point of building up the trust fund was to help cover costs at a future date when taxes would not be sufficient to cover full benefits. Rather than posing any sort of crisis, this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.

The article makes great efforts to confuse readers about the status of the trust fund. It tells readers:

“The $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors to keep benefit checks flowing.”

This is the same situation the the government faces when Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson or any other holder of government bonds decides to cash in their bonds when they become due. In such cases it “must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors.” The Post’s reporters and editors should understand this fact.

The article then goes on to incorrectly accuse Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of misrepresenting the finances of Social Security:

“In an MSNBC interview, he [Senator Reid] added: ‘Social Security does not add a single penny, not a dime, a nickel, a dollar to the budget problems we have. Never has and, for the next 30 years, it won’t do that.’ Such statements have not been true since at least 2009, when the cost of monthly checks regularly began to exceed payroll tax collections. A spokesman said Reid stands by his comments and his view that Social Security is entirely self-financed.”

Of course Senator Reid is exactly right. The system is self-financed under the law. In 2009 it began drawing on the interest on the government bonds it held. That is exactly what the law dictates, when Social Security needs more money than it collects in taxes, it is supposed to draw on the bonds that were purchased with Social Security taxes in the past. This means it is self-financing…

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

I have posted comprehensive restaurant listings with links for several new communities:

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

Wow – it’s been a busy three weeks health news wise – so I will use a short-hand approach to much of this report (click on links for details):

Things I do that are good for me:

Eating Fruits and Raw Vegetables Can Change the Effect of Your Genes

The researchers discovered the gene that is the strongest marker for heart disease can actually be modified by generous amounts of fruit and raw vegetables.

Health benefits of broccoli require the whole food, not supplements

Statins reduce severity of head injuries

Analgesics Use Associated With Increased Risk for Renal Cell Carcinoma

Use of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and nonaspirin nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (including Advil) was associated with a significantly increased risk for developing renal cell carcinoma, according to data presented at the 10th AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held Oct. 22-25, 2011. It has previously been reported that people who take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) (other than aspirin) such as ibuprofen (Advil) may have a higher risk of having a heart attack or a stroke than people who do not take these medications.

I try to keep my stress levels down, but it doesn’t always work:

HIGH TO MODERATE LEVELS OF STRESS LEAD TO HIGHER MORTALITY RATE

A new study concludes that men who experience persistently moderate or high levels of stressful life events over a number of years have a 50 percent higher mortality rate.

In general, the researchers found only a few protective factors against these higher levels of stress – people who self-reported that they had good health tended to live longer and married men also fared better. Moderate drinkers also lived longer than non-drinkers.

I stopped taking Vitamin E quite a while ago, but this is scary:

Increased prostate cancer risk from vitamin E supplements

I don’t take any of the herbal supplements listed here (or any other herbal supplements), but still worry about the supplements I do take:

Things I hardly ever do, but could do more of without risk:

Biggest ever study shows no link between mobile phone use and tumors

This is really weird – (fish bad, high fat dairy good?) I don’t know quite what to make of it. One possibility – a lot of the fish consumed was fried, and accompanied by french fries.

Dietary Patterns = Increased Colorectal Cancer Risk in Women

The researchers found that those women who most often consumed high amounts of red meat, fish and sugar-sweetened beverages and low amounts of high-fat dairy, coffee and whole grains had a 35 percent increased risk for colorectal cancer.

I don’t agree with this article because it lumps in all supplements (such as Omega 3 oil, Co-enzyme Q, and alpha lipoic acid, all of which I take) with vitamins, and, as the commenters point out, ignores the importance of taking Vitamin D (the only vitamin I take) supplements:

Is This the End of Popping Vitamins?

The case for dietary supplements is collapsing.

A succession of large-scale human studies, including two published earlier this month in leading medical journals, suggests that multivitamins and many other dietary supplements often don’t have health benefits—and in some cases may even cause harm.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The new deficit-reduction plan from a majority of Democrats on the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “supercommittee”) marks a dramatic departure from traditional Democratic positions — and actually stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate’s “Gang of Six,” and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission. The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan. The Democratic plan features a substantially higher ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases than any of the bipartisan plans.

Specifically:

- The Democratic plan contains $92 billion more in Medicare and Medicaid cuts ($475 billion) than Bowles-Simpson ($383 billion), and the same or a greater amount of cuts in this area than the Gang of Six plan.
- At the same time, the Democratic plan contains $800 to $900 billion less in revenue increases than the Bowles-Simpson and Gang of Six plans

Fortunately, Republicans are refusing to take “we surrender” for an answer. Let’s hope the Democrats develop some spine, and let the supercommittee die without a plan – the default is better than what they have already proposed – especially in regards to cutting defense spending.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

In five days, world population is projected to reach 7 billion. How we respond now will determine whether we have a healthy, sustainable and prosperous future or one that is marked by inequalities, environmental decline and economic setbacks, according to The State of World Population 2011 report, published Oct. 26 by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

Our record population size can be viewed in many ways as a success for humanity because it means that people are living longer and more of our children are surviving worldwide, the report shows. But not everyone has benefited from this achievement or the higher quality of life that this implies. Great disparities exist among and within countries. Disparities in rights and opportunities also exist between men and women, girls and boys. Charting a path now to development that promotes equality, rather than exacerbates or reinforces inequalities, is more important than ever.

There are 215 million women of childbearing age in developing countries who lack access to voluntary family planning. There are millions of adolescent girls and boys in the developing world who have too little access to sexuality education and information about how to prevent pregnancies or protect themselves from HIV. In pockets of the world where women’s status is low, infant and child survival are also low. We must tear down economic, legal and social barriers, to put women and men and boys and girls on an equal footing in all spheres of life.

The State of World Population 2011 is mainly a report from the field, where demographers, policymakers, governments, civil society and individuals are grappling with population trends ranging from aging to rapidly rising numbers of young people, from high population growth rates to shrinking populations, and from high rates of urbanization to rising international migration. The countries featured in this report are China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, India, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

I’ve been inclined to give Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt as he runs for President. I have argued that he is jsut doing what is necessary to win his crazy party’s nomination, but will revert to the same general common sense he displayed as governor of Massachusetts.

The problem with this is people tend to begin to believe what they hear themselves saying over and over again. And now Romney has gone over the deep end on global warming:

So there is no one left on the Republican side with any claim to rational thinking whatsoever.