Herman Cain turns down "Dancing with the Stars"

I think someone still thinks he has a chance of being a VP candidate. Read the rest of this post...

Five CBS stories that ought to make Obama smile

Poll: Obama holds edge over GOP hopefuls

President Obama holds a significant lead over each of his potential Republican opponents in the general election, according to a poll released Tuesday by CBS News and the New York Times. That includes Mitt Romney, who was even with Mr. Obama last month.

The new survey shows the president leading Romney by six points, 48 percent to 42 percent, among registered voters. Last month, the two men were tied at 45 percent each.

Mr. Obama's lead over former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who has surged to a lead in national polls, is eight points: 49 percent to 41 percent.

Romney's drop in support against the president is attributable to a shift among independents. Last month, independents favored the former Massachusetts governor by eight points over Mr. Obama. In the new survey, Mr. Obama holds the edge, leading Romney among independents by nine points.

Poll: Obama's ratings rise as economic outlook improves

Voters tend to think both parties are more likely to be headed off on the wrong track than in the right direction, but they are more critical of the Republicans. While just 35 percent think the Democratic Party is headed in the right direction, this number drops even lower - to 26 percent - for the Republican Party. Six in 10 think the Republican Party is off on the wrong track; half say the same about the Democratic Party.

Seventy-three percent of Democrats think their party is headed in the right direction, while 55 percent of Republicans think the same of the Republican Party. Independents think both parties are headed in the wrong direction, though more think this of the Republican Party (67 percent) than the Democratic Party (56 percent).

Poll: Most GOP voters think long primary hurts nominee

57 percent of Republican voters nationwide say a drawn-out nomination battle - and the associated attacks on a candidate - would hurt the nominee's chances in 2012.

Poll: Most back mandating contraception coverage

According to a survey, conducted between Feb. 8-13, 61 percent of Americans support federally-mandated contraception coverage for religiously-affiliated employers; 31 percent oppose such coverage.

The number is similar among self-professed Catholics surveyed: 61 percent said they support the Obama administration's rule, while 32 percent oppose it.

Majorities of both men and women said they are in favor of the rule.

Poll: Rick Santorum takes slight lead in GOP race

Santorum has the support of 30 percent of GOP primary voters in the poll, following by Romney at 27 percent. Ron Paul is now in third at 12 percent, followed by Newt Gingrich at 10 percent.

The socially conservative former Pennsylvania senator received the backing of just 16 percent of Republican primary voters in a similarly worded question last month, leaving him in third place behind Gingrich.

Read the rest of this post...

Video: Love super-cut ("I love you" from lots of movies)

This is really cute.

Read the rest of this post...

Komen's corporate sponsors (a list)

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about Komen, its cosmetics-company sponsors, and lack of emphasis on research into environmental factors of breast cancer, including ... well, chemicals.

I'm offering this Komen-created list of corporate sponsors for your information. Peruse and use as you wish.

Presumably, the list is a subset, selected names only. Interestingly, almost none of the earlier-mentioned beauty product companies are on it — no Estée Lauder, no Revlon. There are beauty companies listed — Redken, Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc., etc. But the big names are not listed. I'm not sure what that means, but it's interesting.

We do know that Komen for the Cure cares 24% about actual research (so long as it doesn't look too hard at environmental factors), and they care twice as much, almost 50% about "education" (whatever that is) in their mission to do something about breast cancer.

I therefore offer this list in the interest of your education (h/t commenter judybrowni). At some point you may decide it's worth having.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Arab countries hint at arming Syrian opposition

The US and Europe have enough problems (including budget issues) without yet another war, but the Arab world is different. If they follow through with their threat to arm the opposition, Assad's future could be a lot more cloudy than it is today. Reuters:

Sunday's Arab League meeting raised the stakes. Its implicit shuffle towards backing military resistance to Assad's forces was meant to add pressure on the Syrian leader and his Russian and Chinese allies. Yet it also risks leading to a Libya-style conflict or sectarian civil war that everyone wants to avoid.

"It is unacceptable for Assad to practice all types of killing of civilians while we stand silent," one Arab ambassador said, explaining the rationale behind the resolution that returned the Syria issue to the United Nations with a call for a joint U.N.-Arab peacekeeping force.

"We will back the opposition financially and diplomatically in the beginning but if the killing by the regime continues, civilians must be helped to protect themselves. The resolution gives Arab states all options to protect the Syrian people," the envoy said.

Read the rest of this post...

Goldman Sachs lobbies to be excluded from Volker Rule

Just so we all understand, the bank that needed to be rescued by the US government (just like the other losers on Wall Street), and received 100 cents on the dollar for their garbage despite having a value well under 50%, wants to be special, again.

It's not fair to anyone to keep making exceptions to the rules for Goldman Sachs. This is what happens when the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street - and Goldman, in particular - revolves so freely. Why bother having rules when everyone is exempt from the rules?  From Bloomberg:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which says it owns the world’s largest family of so-called mezzanine loan funds, is asking regulators to loosen proposed limits on bank investments in such pools.

Four Goldman Sachs employees and three lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell LLP met on Feb. 2 with Federal Reserve Board staff to discuss Volcker rule limits on banks’ fund investments, according to a summary published yesterday by the central bank. The Volcker rule limits depository institutions from supplying more than 3 percent of the capital in a hedge fund, private- equity fund or other “covered fund.”

Read the rest of this post...

The most touching use of Twitter, a Valentine’s story

I like Twitter for what it is.  A nice way to cull the news (I subscribe to good people), and a fun way to be humorously snippy, a thing we Washingtonians (of the right coast variety) excel at.

That's why this story from NPR is not just quite touching, but it's really quite novel.

There's no point in me recounting it.  It doesn't take long.  Just visit the site, scroll down two paragraphs, and start clicking the little arrow below the photo, scroll through the tweets and learn about a man and his parents on the one year anniversary of his father's death. (If you want, you can just read through the tweets here, all on one page.)

Seriously, it will take 3 minutes, and is worth it. Read the rest of this post...

Mormons secretly baptize Holocaust victim and Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal’s parents

So the Mormons have now attempted to steal the souls of the parents of famed Nazi hunter, the late Simon Weisenthal, just like they tried to steal the soul of thousands of victims of the Holocaust, including Anne Frank, and even such people as Barack Obama's late mother, who was "conicidentally" baptized only months before the 2008 presidential election.  From NPR:

[T]he discovery in 1992 of the names of thousands of victims of the holocaust prompted protests from Jewish groups and a series of meetings between Jewish and Mormon leaders.

The Mormon Church responded by promising to purge its baptism rolls of holocaust victims and urge members to limit baptisms to relatives. But the unwelcome baptisms continued.

"This is an issue that doesn't go away," Cooper says. "There needs to be internal reflection on the [Mormon] thinking that takes names like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal's parents and says, 'these souls have to be saved.'"

Genealogical researchers discovered in Mormon baptism records the name of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who chronicled her family's hiding from the Nazis before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

The Wiesenthal Center says the father and grandfather of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel were recently listed in a Mormon database that makes them available for baptism. Wiesel survived Auschwitz but his father died there before the concentration camp was liberated.

So it's been 20 years now that the Jews first begged, then demanded, that the Mormons stop secretly baptizing Holocaust victims, and the Mormons just haven't been able to fix the problem - AFTER TWENTY YEARS.  Mind you, the Mormons promised to stop baptizing all Jews, unless they're direct ancestors of Mormons, back in 1995.  Oops.

At some point, if you've been repeatedly asked to do something, and you still don't do it after being asked again and again and again, and then twenty years pass, and you're still doing it (even though you said you stopped) - you lose the ability to say "sorry," because you're obviously just a liar.

Oh, and here's a new line from the Mormons:

"This baptism is not binding on [the dead] unless they accept it," [Mormon Apostle Quentin] Cook continued. "They're given the opportunity. So, we consider this a great effort of love."

Well that's a new one. In the past, the Mormons have usually responded that the dead have the option to "opt out." And I've always noted that I've never heard of a dead person opting out of (or for that matter, in to) anything.  Now the Mormons are saying that the dead must "opt in" or the baptism doesn't fix.

(In fact, I did some research and it seems the official church sites say the dead have the option to opt in OR opt out. That's a bit of an odd way to put it. The option to opt out? What happens if the dead don't affirmatively choose the option to "opt out"? It's one thing to say you can choose to opt in if you want (I still think it's an offensive practice), but it's quite another when you add in "opt out." That means something happens if you don't opt out.))

I'd love to hear the Mormons explain how they "know" the choices that dead people make after they're dead.  (Also note that Quentin Cook doesn't even mention the part about "opting out.")

Let's put aside for a moment the fact that the Mormons seem to have an ever-changing story about their spiritual grave-robbing.  If the Mormons now claim that they give the dead the choice to say "yes" to the baptism, why don't they just offer the baptism to the living, who we know actually have a choice? Perhaps because the living would say no?

Speaking of Mormon soul stealing, did you know that Mormon Bishop Mitt Romney has himself conducted baptisms for the dead?  From Andrea Stone at HuffPo:

In 2007, when Romney made his first run for the Republican nomination, NECN in Hartford, Conn., asked him about baptizing the dead. He said he is "not a cafeteria Mormon" and adheres to all tenets of his faith. But Romney, a former bishop and top church official in Boston, referred specific questions to religious leaders.

When Newsweek magazine asked Romney if he personally had performed posthumous baptisms on anyone, author Jonathan Darman wrote, "he looked slightly startled and answered, 'I have in my life, but I haven't recently.' The awareness of how odd this will sound to many Americans is what makes Romney hesitant to elaborate on the Mormon question."

There was no mention, and it is not known, whether the people that Romney personally baptized were Jewish.

Requests for comment by Romney campaign and the Mormon Church were not answered.

I'd be curious to know if Mitt Romney forcibly converted any Jews, and especially Holocaust victims.  (Or any Baptists, for that matter.)  Perhaps someone should ask him. Read the rest of this post...

Debt ratings for Italy, Spain & Portugal cut by Moody’s

None of that is much of a surprise, but the warning to France and the UK is rattling the markets. That warning should also not be a surprise, but in this environment where things change rapidly, the markets are jittery.

It's becoming obvious even to the markets that wanted strict austerity in the UK that strict austerity was the wrong direction. The UK economy continues to soften and show little signs of growth, which is a direct result of the poorly planned austerity program by the Conservatives. Keep in mind that the UK economy will only get worse since the harshest cuts are only now being rolled out.

Moody’s Investors Service cut the debt ratings of six European countries including Italy, Spain and Portugal and said it may strip France and the U.K. of their top Aaa ratings, citing Europe’s debt crisis.

Spain was downgraded to A3 from A1 yesterday, Italy to A3 from A2 and Portugal to Ba3 from Ba2, all with negative outlooks. Slovakia, Slovenia and Malta also had their ratings lowered.

“Policy makers have made steps forward but we do not think they have done enough to reassure the market that we are on a stable path,” said Alistair Wilson, chief credit officer for Europe at Moody’s in London. “What will guide long-term ratings is the clarity and the performance of policy makers and the macro picture.”

What also jumps out at this time is how, despite this bad news, the dollar continues to struggle against the euro. The quantitative easing - Bernanke's printing of money - discussion scares the markets. Read the rest of this post...

Will Israel attack Iran?

Hard on the heels of this post, "Are we being set up for war with Iran?" I was pointed to this one by the writer Masaccio on a different side of the same subject, "Israel, Iran, and the Bomb".

He considers whether Israel will make the move this year (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

Horse race coverage isn’t limited to the Republican primary. Foreign policy coverage has its own, exemplified by the title of an article by Ronen Bergman in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Will Israel Attack Iran?[.]

Bergman says yes. Israel will attack Iran sometime this year, before Iran enters the “immunity zone”, the point at which Iranian knowledge, skill and material will be so great that an attack will not derail their progress towards construction of a bomb. Iran denies that it is building a nuclear weapon, but no one seems to believe that.

The Times article certainly meets our criteria for "preparing the battlefield" of American public opinion. But are its statements true?

As Masaccio notes, Bergman lists three conditions for an Israeli attack:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

According to Masaccio, the Times writer thinks "all three conditions have been met."

He then runs down a number of other media sources who weigh in on the same question. It's a good review of the current "What will Israel do next?" parlor game. If you care about this question — and frankly, with the Super Bowl now completely behind us, why wouldn't you? — check it out.

As to my favorite question: Could they be that stupid? Masaccio lists the considerable downsides to an attack (it's a compelling list), then says:

It’s harder to see the benefits.

Indeed, say I. But again, I said that once about Iraq, and look where that got us.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Pink Ribbons, Inc —"Let's take back the ribbon and tie it to our cause"

Part of what gets lost in the fog around the Komen for the Cure controversy is that the Komen money doesn't just fund an organization that's Movement Conservative at its core.

The Komen money also funds an pro-corporate effort to minimize awareness of environmental causes of breast cancer, and to send as little money into environmental research as possible.

As I wrote earlier (quoting and commenting on Barbara Ehrenreich's great essay on the subject):

Breast cancer really is different from any other health care charity

Breast cancer has a unique place among the country's charity "opportunities." For example, here Ehrenreich considers breast cancer's causes, noting that only 10% of breast cancers are gene-based, and looks at (1) the studies of environmental factors, (2) the issue of feminism, and (3) corp-friendly orgs like Komen:

[E]mphasis on possible ecological factors, which is not shared by groups such as Komen and the American Cancer Society, puts the feminist breast-cancer activists in league with other, frequently rambunctious, social movements -- environmental and anticorporate.

... and ...

as Cindy Pearson, director of the National Women's Health Network, the organizational progeny of the Women's Health Movement, puts it more caustically: "Breast cancer provides a way of doing something for women, without being feminist."

Smart. Can you see the corporate compromises shaping up? No ecology please, if you want our bucks. Some of us have pollution "issues." And feminist-free, thank you very much. Wouldn't want to offend Mr. Limbaugh, whom we may also sponsor.

Here's Ehrenreich from elsewhere in the same essay (my emphasis):

[B]reast cancer has blossomed from wallflower to the most popular girl at the corporate charity prom. While AIDS goes begging and low-rent diseases like tuberculosis have no friends at all, breast cancer has been able to count on Revlon, Avon, Ford, Tiffany, Pier 1, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Lee Jeans, Saks Fifth Avenue, JC Penney, Boston Market, Wilson athletic gear -- and I apologize to those I've omitted.

Are you catching the cosmetics makers (or do I need to bold the bolding)?

What would be the corporate interest of, say, Estée Lauder, in funding a cancer charity that's (1) anti-feminist; (2) gives only 24% of its intake to research; (3) downplays the environmental (in this case, chemical) causes of the disease?

Remember, corps want only money; it's the law. Cosmetics companies like Estée Lauder, Avon and Revlon will naturally have these corporate interests (among others):

    ▪ Eliminate threats to profits represented by environmentalists
    ▪ Increase profit by playing the role of lover of women's health and well-being

If you're a company that profits from painting a faceful of chemicals on women's skin, loyal Bushie–led Komen is just right for you. Doubt it? Read that list of corporate interests again.

If Komen for the Cure didn't already exist, the cosmetic industry's lobbying firm would invent it.

Which leads me to a film about all this — Pink Ribbons, Inc. Here's the trailer:



From the Pink Ribbons, Inc. info page:

“We used to march in the streets; now we run for a cure.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author and social critic.

Breast cancer has become the poster child of corporate cause-related marketing campaigns. Countless women and men walk, bike, climb and shop for the cure. Each year, millions of dollars are raised in the name of breast cancer, but where does this money go and what does it actually achieve?

PINK RIBBONS, INC. is a feature documentary that shows how the devastating reality of breast cancer, which marketing experts have labeled a “dream cause,” has been hijacked by a shiny, pink story of success.

For screening info, click here.

More later; I don't want to let this die until Komen is cured of its own disease — MoveCon infiltration.

Update: As this commenter points out, the above-named cosmetics companies is no longer on Komen's funders list. This could be for several reasons — Komen's list could be a subset of their funders (more on this shortly), or they may have stopped their funding sometime after Ms. Ehrenreich wrote about them. I have every confidence that Barbara Ehrenreich's information was correct at the time of publication and for some period after that.

GP Read the rest of this post...

GOP finally caves on extending payroll tax cut. But why?

The GOP has finally thrown in the towel after several months of trying to explain why letting tax cuts expire for the 1% represents a 'tax increase,' but letting the payroll tax cuts for the 99% expire is 'necessary for balancing the budget.'

U.S. House Republicans offered to drop their demand to finance a 10-month payroll tax cut extension with spending reductions and may vote on the plan this week if they don’t reach a broader agreement with Democrats.

The Republican proposal, which would add $94 billion to the budget deficit, reflects the desire to avoid blame for an impasse, as when a breakdown in talks almost caused the tax break to expire Dec. 31, said a Republican leadership aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Democrats have sought an income surtax for people earning more than $1 million a year. Republicans are trying to defuse the tax issue, the aide said.

Since President Obama took office, the GOP has been clear that their number one priority is to stop him from being re-elected, and they were quite prepared to sabotage any effort to promote an economic recovery if necessary. That plan doesn't look so smart now that the unemployment rate is showing steady improvement and the GOP presidential nomination has come down to a choice between two unelectable religious right clowns, and an equally unelectable Mormon bishop.

If I were a GOP House member (or Senator), I would be less worried about what the Republican leadership wants, and more worried about the voters (especially Independents) come November.  The Collins/Snowe break with the party line over contraception may have been the beginning of the rats leaving the ship. Read the rest of this post...