Black and White Night on the City Freeway wallpaper
To get the horse race stuff out of the way, After Many Momentum Shifts, Michigan Is Too Close to Call
In fact, after adding in a poll from Public Policy Polling that showed Mr. Santorum ahead by five points in interviews conducted on Monday night, our forecast model of the state briefly showed a tie, with Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum each at 37.6 percent of the vote.
A second poll was then published, from Foster McCollum White Associates and Baydoun Consulting, which showed Mr. Romney with a narrow two-point lead. That was enough to put Mr. Romney back ahead in the forecast model — by the whopping margin of 0.7 of a percentage point. The forecast now gives Mr. Romney a 55 percent chance to win Michigan and Mr. Santorum a 45 percent chance.
I never have understood robocalls. If they are from someone I support I pause for a second to reconsider my support. That’s how irritating they are and most people that bring up the subject do so to complain. They probably work in terms of shoring up support among far Right conservatives when someone yells that Obama is going to take away your guns or other hot button reactionary issues that conservatives use as dog whistle politics. It gets confusing when a Rightie conservative is making them to Democrats. Not in terms of what they’re after, but why they think it will work, Santorum Robocall Asks Michigan Dems To Vote For Him (AUDIO)
Following some speculation that the robocall may have been a “false flag” effort designed to harm Santorum, a spokesman Hogan Gidley confirmed to TPM that they were indeed footing the bill, and reaching beyond party lines. “If we can get the Reagan Democrats in the primary, we can get them in the general,” he told TPM.
It’s a controversial tactic. Bill Ballenger, a longtime Michigan politico and the editor of Inside Michigan Politics, spoke with TPM about the call earlier in the day. He said the call piqued his interest because it sounded like it could have come from a union targeting Romney ahead of the Feb. 28 primary. The call focuses on Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout and calls on Democrats to vote for Santorum Tuesday because of it.
“It went on and on like this and I kept listening because I kind of smelled a rat,” Ballenger said. “And finally at the very end, in a tagline it says, ‘this call was paid for by the Santorum for president committee.’”
Santorum is also making calls saying he has the NRA endorsement, but they deny they have endorsed anyone. Conservatives lying and playing dirty tricks on each other does make the hose race more of a spectacle, but it seems that no matter what they do, conservatives seem like Niccolo Machiavelli prince wannabes. To them this all looks very clever. To the rest of us it looks like grown men throwing peanut shells at each other. Conservatives cannot seem to overcome their inability to tackle facts, have good judgment or deal in substance. Which brings us to one of the greatest political games in town: conservatives writing columns about every candidate that surges in a poll or two, saying this guy is eminently electable and the one Democrats fear most. Which brings us to conservative pundit James Taranto courtesy Rupert Murdoch, What’s the Matter With ‘Nebraska’? A frivolous essay underscores the left’s serious prejudices.
This column has recently become skeptical of the view–nearly universal on the liberal left but common as well among conservative elites–that Rick Santorum is “unelectable” or far less likely than Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama in November. A new USA Today poll reinforces our skepticism.
[ ]….The trouble with this is that, as we’ve noted, “the extremism on sexual politics” is in substantial part mythical–and the propagation of the myth doesn’t seem to be hurting Santorum. The timing of USA Today’s survey (Feb. 14-21 in the swing states and Feb. 20-21 nationwide) coincides with a media hysteria in which the former senator’s critics have frequently exaggerated or distorted his views to make him appear more extreme than he is. If he wins the nomination, he will have several months to explain himself to an electorate in which extreme social liberals constitute a small minority. (emphasis mine)
Jimmy would be in the park park of being correct about Santourm’s voting record on contracpetion and women’s health issues. That is not the Santourm running for office today,
…but his website now includes a number of executive actions he would take to pare back the program. In October, he also spoke on the “dangers of contraception in this country,” and in the past has also called it “harmful to women.”
Despite the fact that even if we pare down Santorum’s potential support to just Catholics, most Catholics do not support Santorum, the conservative agenda or the American Bishop’s (More Catholics support contraception coverage than other Americans)views on providing contraception as part of their health insurance coverage. Taranto has taken up the bizarre meme on the far Right that Catholic individuals stop being individual human beings. They claim – Rick and Jimmy – that the church’s privileges trump the rights of individual U.S. citizens to have the same unfettered access to health coverage as men. And let’s stop the ridiculous idea that Santorum is dispenser of official Catholic Church doctrine. Santorum rejects climate change as some kind of conspiracy – the Pope and official church doctrine says that climate change is real and should be addressed. Santorum is in violation of church edits. Santorum, Jimmy and the conservative agenda rejects any kind of aid to the poor, including food stamps. The Pope supports food assistance and anti-poverty programs. The Vatican accepts evolution as a proven fact. Conservative believe the earth and the rest of the universe sprung out of fairy dust a couple thousand years ago. If Santorum wants to reject the teachings of his church that is not only fine, but a right guaranteed him in the 1st Amendment, but let’s not pretend that Santorum has corned the market on last word in morality religious values when it is obvious to anyone not partaking of the koservative kool-aid that he has not. Jimbo goes to to repeat this moldy piece of conservative idiocy,
The liberal left is disdainful, both culturally and ideologically, of Middle America, and that is why the Democratic Party keeps nominating meritocratic toffs like Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama. (emphasis mine)
Such a crock. That is not a dog whistle it is yet another conservative calling on the worse kind of identity politics – the real foks, the real Americans live in this mythical place that liberals do not understand. Its hard to see from Taranto’s ivory tower at Murdoch’s yellow pages for hackery, but Democrats work in auto plants, steel mills, hospitals, in the Marines, on construction sites, own small businesses – they love their families, they work hard, they ain’t perfect but they try to live decent lives and do what is best for their country. America is free today because so many of them gave their lives in a real war worth fighting, WW II. After that war they built the biggest strongest economy in history – conservatives. through their economic polices have guaranteed that China will inherit that mantle. As long as conservatives like Jimbo refuse to acknowledge these simple facts is just another day in my belief that conservatism is the refuge of moral cowards. Jimbo cannot, conservatives cannot ever acknowledge basic truths because they would be left defenseless without their stock pile of sleazy lies, disinformation and denial of reality. Jimbo, Santorum, Romney, Gingrich, Paul Ryan – the entire crop of conservative poltroons believe that people like the Koch brothers, Romney and other conservative leeches built the USA. They are in breathtakingly insulting denial about the obvious, that workers who made the products, provided the services and turned around and created the demand are the real heroes of the U.S. economy. And they have the gall to call liberal Democrats elitists.
But this split between abstract beliefs and the concrete needs of daily life doesn’t just apply to government programs: It applies to government regulations as well. Last Thursday, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a survey that revealed what Pew termed “Mixed Views of Government Regulation.” But “mixed,” in this case, means anti-regulatory in matters of ideology and pro-regulatory in practice. Asked whether they believed that government regulation of business was necessary to protect the public or that such regulation usually does more harm than good, just 40 percent answered that regulation was necessary, while 52 percent said it did more harm than good.
But then came the specifics. Pew asked whether federal regulations should be strengthened, kept as is, or reduced in particular areas. When it came to food production and packaging, 53 percent said strengthen, 36 percent said keep as is, and just 7 percent said reduce. In environmental safeguards, the breakdown was 50 percent strengthen, 36 percent keep as is, 17 percent reduce. In car safety and efficiency, the split was 45, 42, and 9 percent. In workplace safety and health, it was 41, 45, and 10 percent. And with prescription drugs, it was 39, 33, and 20 percent.
Pew then followed up by asking whether there were too few regulations on particular kinds of businesses, the right amount, or too many. For the oil and gas industry, 44 percent said too little, 14 percent the right amount, and 36 percent too much. For banks and financial institutions, it was 43 percent too little, 20 percent just right, and 30 percent too much. For the health insurance industry, the breakdown was 40,18, and 37.
For large corporations generally, it was 43 percent too little, 19 percent the right amount, and 31 percent too much.
On issue after issue the crazy leftists appear to represent mainstream America. yet we come against the I’m against gov’mint but keep your hands off my Social Security mentality. Most liberals are not pro regulation. That is the straw man argument used by conservative zealots. Also echoed by the lazy broadcast media who happily buys into conservative framing. Liberals are pro just enough regulation that consumers, investors and workers are not beaten up by the greed, fraud and irresponsibility of large corporations, Wall Street, toxic polluters and a health care industry whose costs are not constrained by the normal market forces constrain the costs of potatoes.
Upper class people more likely to cheat: study
“The increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed,” said Paul Piff, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (Monday, Feb. 27) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Piff’s study is the latest in a series of UC Berkeley scholarly investigations into the relationship between socio-economic class and prosocial and antisocial emotions and behaviors, revealing new information about class differences during a time of rising economic tension.
“As these issues come to the fore, our research – and that by others – helps shed light on the role of inequality in shaping patterns of ethical conduct and selfish behavior, and points to certain ways in which these patterns might also be changed,” Piff said.
The government per se may not be able to ever rid us of this kind of behavior. Government can bring back the social contract that said we’ll tolerant some of this as long as you pay your fair share of the infrastructure. Conservatives want to scrape the social contract that builds and maintains that infrastructure. Without it there is no middle-class, there are just the crony capitalists and the serfdom.
Panoramic map of Stockholm Around 1870 CE
Heinrich Neuhaus (1833–87) was a German-born map maker and lithographer who worked in Sweden for many years. His largest and best-known work is this panoramic map of Stockholm, which he created in the 1870s using an oblique image in isometric perspective. The buildings on the map are depicted with remarkable accuracy. Neuhaus is reported to have said that in order to produce the map, he walked through every neighborhood of the city and sketched the exterior of its buildings and other structures. The map captures the rapid growth of Stockholm that was characteristic of major European cities in the second half of the 19th century. Neuhaus made maps in a similarly three-dimensional style of the Stockholm districts of Norrmalm, Sodermalm, and Ostermalm.
The work and detail that went into this street map are astounding. Someone once said that if it is not worth being obsessed about it is not worth doing. Neuhaus seemed to be obsessed.
The Long Goodbye 