Interesting

Ok - it's Bloomberg and all, but there's a lot of "bidness guys" who understand the basics of the science and they know it's real etc, but who still feel trapped in the closet.  Maybe this gives them a way out.  It's a start anyway.

It's The Visuals, Stupid

The people running Willard's campaign have to be some of the least adept political operatives ever.  You have to know that Romney's little stunt in Ohio - the one that wasn't a campaign rally at all cuz it was really a food drive event(?) was another stab at making Willard not look like The Rich Guy With No Fuckin' Clue.  Oops.

From Kay Coppins at BuzzFeed, via AmericaBlog:

But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it “did donate supplies to the relief effort,” but would not specify how much it spent.)

Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, “What if we dropped off our donations up front?”The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. “Just grab something,” he said.

Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their “donations” to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest “Thank you.”

If you took maybe three minutes to go the the Red Cross website on your iPhone, you'd know what was going to go wrong with your attempt to look helpful.  Three lousy minutes, and you might've learned something, and you wouldn't leave yourself open to the massive ridicule being dumped on your over-gelled head.  You wanted a good photo op?  You just gave everybody a good look at just how out of touch you are.

And I get it - I really do - you know you get slammed for being a rich-boy jag-off who never thinks about anything but his money and what his money can buy, but this was the one chance you'd get where throwing money at the problem is the right thing to do; and what did you do?  What the fuck did you do, Willard?  You did exactly the opposite of what was needed.  And that kinda sums it all up, doesn't it?

Gettin' It Done - 5

Nothing saves money like not wasting lives.  We have a better chance to accomplish our Foreign Policy goals (in practically every case) when we don't have our uniformed military in a country killing their people and blowin' their shit up.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.

Today's Pix

Doonesbury

Aircraft Carriers

China recently unveiled its brand new toy - which it bought (as surplus) from Ukraine - and which BTW, has yet to be fitted out to make it capable of launching and landing AIRPLANES.

Correct - China has an aircraft carrier that can't carry aircraft.  I feel so threatened.

Your Civics Homework

We might get around to fixing this one of these days - but I'm not holding my breath.

Oh, Willard

Willard's team decided they'd try to make it look like they had any fuckin' clue on what to do about the problems thrown at us by Superstorm Sandy, so they dressed up a campaign rally to look like they give a rat's ass about anything but themselves.

Too typical.  But it points up (again) the simple fact that the Repubs are always trying to substitute these empty gestures and photo ops for real policy and helpful action.

Balloon Juice takes 'em down.

But Romney is shameless. He wants to use Sandy’s destruction as a media hook, so he re-branded his rally for the stupid and gullible members of the press as a “storm relief’ effort. To underscore the stupid deception, Mitt asked attendees to bring can goods to the rally, as if random truckloads of unsorted can goods flooding a disaster area are useful. The Red Cross is pretty specific that these kinds of efforts produce piles of supplies that cannot be used and cause real problems for relief efforts:

Does the American Red Cross accept donated goods?

Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel.

Something else it points up - Romney is another silver-spoon legacy puke who doesn't know the first fuckin' thing about the lives or the problems of real people, and apparently he knows even less about any of the mechanisms in place that actually work to help real people when they need it.

Unconfirmed

..but of course, we can run with it because of the rule: "Significant If True".

So eat it, Repubs.  You wanna make shit up about Obama, then you can bloody well expect to get it back.

Gettin' It Done - 6

It's not a good idea to celebrate the violent destruction of a fellow human being, and it's not in keeping with the high concept of Due Process just to hunt a guy down and kill him, but if there's ever a good reason to make exceptions, Osama bin Laden was it.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.