Rising flood waters at doorstep of Nebraska nuclear plant:
“And if the water gets in here, what would be the result?” Mr. Jaczko asked.
“We’ve got a sump pump over here,” said Dan Goodman, the assistant operations manager
Well, then. That settles it. Nothing to see here. I can’t think of one instance of high water causing troubles for a nuclear plant anyway…
WI Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley: The facts are that I was demanding that [fellow WI SC Justice David Prosser] get out of my office and he put his hands around my neck in anger in a chokehold
Greta Van Sustern: And while I have no idea who is off the wall (Justice Prosser or Justice Walsh or both), I do know one thing, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson sure is not doing her job to lead the court and to give confidence to the people of Wisconsin. She needs to step aside and let someone else attempt to run that zoo.
Lemkin: Indeed, anyone dumb enough to put his/her neck into Prosser’s clearly strangulation-configured hands is just not going to be a terribly effective jurist.
“We’ve known from the beginning that bombing the moon would be a poison pill to any debt-reduction proposal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. See? Or: “President Obama needs to decide between his goal of bombing the moon, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit,” said McConnell and Sen. on Kyl in a joint statement. Or: “First of all, bombing the moon is going to destroy jobs,“ said Speaker John Boehner. "Second, bombing the moon cannot pass the US House of Representatives — it’s not just a bad idea, it doesn’t have the votes and it can’t happen. And third, the American people don’t want us to bomb the moon.”
Across several posts, Dean Baker lays into the dread Liberal Media for just plain making it up when it comes to pushing their preferred, center-right “cut deficits now” agenda.
“The national debt will exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy by 2021 — and balloon to nearly 200 percent of GDP within 25 years — without dramatic cuts to federal health and retirement programs or steep tax increases, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.”
Actually, this is not what the projections showed. The CBO projections showed that if Congress simply followed current law, letting the Bush tax cuts expire, not fixing the alternative minimum tax, and most importantly, allowing the spending caps in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to remain in place, then the debt to GDP ratio will soon stabilize and head downwards.
“The national debt is on pace to equal the annual size of the economy within a decade, levels that could provoke a European-style crisis unless policymakers take action on the federal deficit, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office.”
This is not true. The CBO report did not warn of “a European-style crisis.” The reason it did not is that a European style crisis does not make sense in the context of the United States. The United States can never be like Greece or Ireland for the simply reason that we print out own currency.
In the event that we actually ran up against serious constraints in credit markets the United States would have the option to have the Fed buy up its debt. Greece and Ireland do not have this option. This could create a risk of inflation, but there is not the risk of insolvency that euro zone governments face.
In the top of the hour news segment on Morning Edition, NPR told listeners that the Congressional Budget Office warned that the national debt will soon equal the annual size of the economy and this could lead to a European-style crisis [see: New York Times above].
This is critically important stuff. Deep cuts right now will strangle the economy and deeply hurt Obama’s chance at reelection to boot. This, coupled with the knowledge that as conditions improve, the ability (in the form of public desire) to make huge cuts to the social safety net will diminish precipitously is precisely why the GOP is for deep cuts now. They know that doing nothing and simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire will do more for improved deficits than almost any of the “plans” on the table. The CBO has said so again and again. These “plans” are not and never will be about the deficit. They are about pushing a preferred social agenda. Period. We just can’t get anyone in the media to break free from their “view from nowhere, compromise must always be the preferable, serious person postion” lens for long enough to get them to even report the simple facts of the case at hand.
tl;dr: We’re doomed. There will be a default. Maybe not this time, but soon. Once you’ve set up the terms of debate such that they always include wrangling over lifting the debt ceiling and treating it essentially as a hostage situation, then you’ve created a system that, sooner or later, someone will push too far for their own purely political purposes. And when that happens it will be the end of America as we’ve known it. And I suspect that will be happening pretty damned soon.
After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
[…]
Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.
The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.
Apparently the market-based solution involves pressing 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers into service. That ought to do it.
Next solution: Children ought to be allowed to “help out” and we can just let the market will decide if such labors are safe enough.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple. It says, ‘Raise an army.’ It says absolutely nothing about race, color, creed, sexual orientation.
You all joined for a reason: to serve. To protect our nation, right?
“Yes, sergeant major,” Marines replied.
How dare we, then, exclude a group of people who want to do the same thing you do right now, something that is honorable and noble?
[…]
Get over it. We’re magnificent, we’re going to continue to be. […] Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.
Bill Barnwell uses a z-score to rate various golfing performances to each other. McIlroy’s 2011 US Open is up there (in the top 25), but Tiger’s 2000 destruction of Pebble Beach is as far above the second-best performance of all time as that performance (by Davis Love III) is above the twentieth. Also interesting that Niklaus’ second-place (e.g. losing) effort in the 1977 British Open still ranks as one of the greatest all-time individual performances in golf. Good on you, Jack.
You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing.
You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.
I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.
Should local fans mourn the loss of a true title drought?
Mitt Romney: We have all been distressed by the policies that this administration has put in place over the last two years. We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, antijob strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it’s harder and harder for people to find work.
Ezra Klein: By any measure, this is absurd. Taxes are at a 50-year low. The Dow has staged a roaring recovery. Business profits are near record levels. And the economy has gone from losing 780,000 jobs a month to gaining about 160,000 jobs a month. That is to say, it’s getting easier and easier for people to find work, even if it’s not nearly easy enough.
Lemkin 