Why Do Republicants Lie?

Because they have to to get votes.

They could not very well tell actual reasoning humans they oppose every single progressive social movement for the last 6 or so centuries: from the Magna Carta to Teddy's Square Deal to FDR's New Deal.  They oppose anything to help the common man carve out a decent life in the face of overwhelming money and power that seeks to impoverish the many for the benefit of the few: Medicare and Social Security to name 2 modern manifestations in the United States.

How could any human save for Fox "News" watching fools even fall for this crap?

Ach du lieber mein Gott in Himmel!

Read the Wikipedia version of Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal: "The Square Deal was President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection.[1]"

Control of corporations and consumer protections!

Whoda thunk it?

Well, maybe someone who actually read the New Part of the Bible these Republicants claim to follow, the parts where a man called Jesus rails against the privileged of his day, the brood of vipers.

It pains to block quote the words of anther, but you gotta read this dude's screed.

My emphasis throughout.

[If I were writing a political novel about a presidential campaign, I would never dare have the government-hating, free-market, Rand-adulating vice presidential candidate of the right-wing party have inherited his fortune from a grandfather who made his money from government contracts. It's too obvious, too pat. A fiction editor would say, "Come on, Tomasky, this is just too heavy-handed."

Especially if the same candidate and his running mate were attacking the other guy with a lie that specifically distorted what he'd said about, of all things, roads and bridges! ("You didn't build that.") Grandpappy Ryan did exactly what Obama says other people did to help small businesses thrive. He built the roads. And he was paid to do so by government contracts. Forget fiction. That's even too pat for Hollywood.

Ryan tries to address this by saying there's no contradiction between the source of his wealth and his views because of course he's not anti-government, that's a caricature of his views, etc etc. This is absurd. No one who got into politics because of some arrested-development reaction to reading Ayn Rand is pro-government. He can talk pretty to Ryan Lizza, knowing that he's talking to New Yorker readers, and try to pass himself off as nuanced, but there's nothing nuanced about the numbers.

Back in 2001, Paul O'Neill wrote some talking points as debate prep for Dubya. As Jon Chait wrote in my journal, Democracy, of those talking points:

One frankly conceded, “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes. It’s crucial that your remarks make clear that there is no trade-off here.”

Put more bluntly, what O'Neill was saying here is: You have to lie. By definition, you have to lie. You can't tell people that tax-cutting will result in less money for these programs, which is the truth, so you/we Republicans have to invent a fiction of no trade-offs, of a free market that can deliver everything. What Bush delivered to us was essentially no net job growth in eight years and the worst crisis in 80.

So the Ryan-Romney ticket, as it should properly be called, has to say things like "we want government to do the things it does well." Romney has to say things like he said on TV this morning, "No one is talking about deregulating Wall Street," when in fact he is talking about exactly that. Because they can't tell the truth and hope to get elected.

"What we're going to do here is make sure society's very richest people have a lot more money. Our theory is they will spend it and that will help the whole economy. History hasn't been kind to this idea, but it's our theory and we're sticking to it. These are the people who pay us to run, after all. Besides which, we really don't like poor people; we think at bottom that it's their fault they're poor, so it doesn't really matter to us whether anything trickles down to them." That's the truth. How would that sell?]
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/15/why-by-definition-republicans-have-to-lie.html

Barack, I Thought I was the Only One!

How did they figure out to only ask me for $5?

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/obama-emails-2012-8/

Department of WTF?: Crosby, Stills, Nash, AND Young with Tom Jones

Crosby, Stills, Nash, AND Young appeared with with Tom Jones on the latter's TV show.  Although Neil seemed peeved for years over the appearance, Jones sang the hell out of the song and actually the different styles merged well.

Socialism in the Bible

"11 Poor persons will never disappear from the earth. That’s why I’m giving you this command: you must open your hand generously to your fellow Israelites, to the needy among you, and to the poor who live with you in your land."
- Deuteronomy 15:11

Paul Ryan, Suckled on the Teat of Big Govenment

Well golly gee whiz, Paul Ryan, Hypocrite, WI, preaches the Ayn Rand philosophy of social Darwinism ,that the poor need to suck it up, work through hunger, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Great thought except he states--and maybe even believes--government and laws played no part in creating his wealth, only his own rugged individualism made that possible.

Great story, except for the absolute falsehood.

Paul Ryan made his money the old fashioned way; he inherited it.

Hs grandfather stated  company which built things like roads and highways, things paid for by the federal government which benefited all the citizens of the United States, things which treasonous Republicants refuse to spend money on now because creating jobs might actually benefit the current administration politically.

These selfsame Republicants now weeping and wailing about federal deficits voted for stimulus bills during the Cheney administration.  Paul P90X Ryan even requested money for WI businesses from the Obama administration stimulus programs, rankest hypocrisy of the sublime order.

For Keyne's sake it ain't rocket science; when an economy disastrously slows the federal government ought to step in to provide jobs doing things we all need: fixing bridges, filling potholes, and even putting together solar panels.  People cash their paychecks to buy food and other essentials and enough buying results in an expanding economy.

[...Paul Ryan’s great-grandfather started a construction company to build railroads and, eventually, highways. According to the Web site of Ryan Incorporated Central, the company was “founded in 1884 with a single team of mules building railroad embankments in Southern Wisconsin.” And in the 1800s, railroad construction was subsidized by the federal government. Mid-century, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act into law, providing taxpayer dollars to fund the construction of a transcontinental railway. All railroads thereafter connected to, and benefited from, that public investment....

With a net worth of up to $3.2 million and ranking as the 124th richest member of Congress, Paul Ryan very directly and very significantly benefited from the federal spending he now rails against.

Or does he? What’s funny is that Mr. Anti-Spending secured millions in earmarks for his home state of Wisconsin, including, among other things, $3.3 million for highway projects. And Ryan voted to preserve $40 billion in special subsidies for big oil, an industry in which, it so happens, Ryan and his wife hold ownership stakes. Yet Ryan wants to gut financial aid for college students, food stamps for hungry families, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security — the very things that have, historically, helped poor families climb the ladder of opportunity in America.

And this is precisely the problem with the Romney-Ryan vision for America: It takes the ladder of opportunity and public infrastructure that helped the previous generation and yanks it up for the next generation.....

It’s “I Got Mine, Now Screw You!” economics.]  Emphasis added to emphasize truth.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/14/paul_ryan_didnt_build_that/

These pictures googled come not from epic disaster film du jour but from collapse of Interstate bridge in MN.

Dolphins Dancing off Coast of Ireland

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Dance-of-the-dolphins----50-dolphins-put-on-amazing-display-for-researchers-off-County-Donegal---VIDEO-166867566.html

Do you think they said thanks for all the fish?

Banksy on the Olympics

Banksy art found at the Agonist.

Willard's Laugh; Not just a bug but a feature

[Some public figures get defined by a single image, or a single statement ("Ask not what your country can do for you"; "I am not a crook"). Others have a characteristic linguistic tic or hand gesture that through repetition come to embody them; think of Ronald Reagan's head shake, George W. Bush's shoulder-shimmy, or that closed-fist-with-thumb-on-top thing Bill Clinton used to do.

For Mitt Romney, it's the laugh. I'm sure that at times Romney laughs with genuine mirth, but you know the laugh I'm talking about. It's the one he delivers when he gets asked a question he doesn't want to answer, or is confronted with a demand to explain a flip-flop or a lie. It's the phoniest laugh in the world, the one New York Times reporter Ashley Parker wrote "sounds like someone stating the sounds of laughter, a staccato 'Ha. Ha. Ha.'" Everything Mitt Romney is as a candidate is distilled within that laugh—his insincerity, his ambition, his awkwardness, and above all his fear. When Mitt laughs that way, he is not amused. He is terrified. Because he knows that what he's saying is utter baloney, and he knows that we know it.

So he pretends to find it hilarious that an interviewer wants him to explain why, say, Romneycare was great for Massachusetts but the nearly identical Obamacare is a Stalinist horror for America. Perhaps it is the pain of enacting this facsimile of delight so many times that has hardened Mitt's heart and allowed him to run what has become a campaign of truly singular dishonesty. But whatever moral calculation underlies the decisions he makes, this is the place we have arrived: There may have never been a more dishonest presidential candidate than Mitt Romney.]  emphasis added
http://prospect.org/article/mitt-romneys-terrible-laugh

NBC Olympic Fail

'Tweren't just me wroth with righteous indignation; others felt jobbed too,  NBC acted like they WANT to kill their business, jumping in the tar pits with the rest of the dinosaurs.  Daresay many viewers have resolved to never watch a second of the new show, Animal Practice, mistaken practice more accurately.

[By Joe Lapointe
After treating its captive Olympic audience shabbily for more than two weeks, NBC saved its final sucker punch for the last hour Sunday night during its tape-delayed closing ceremonies.

Instead of showing the festivities continuously from start to finish, NBC pulled a classic-bait-and switch with its audience – at least on the East Coast -- by inserting a new sit-com called “Animal Practice” that began shortly before 11 p.m.

It appeared to be about the whacky, zany adventures of some madcap veterinarians. “We’ll be back in about an hour,” host Bob Costas told the audience.

That meant the viewers wishing to see “The Who” and other parts of the grand finale, had to wait until after midnight on a night when most people wanted to get to bed to rest for work on Monday.

All ceremonies had taken place hours before, but NBC chose to hold its telecast so the production could be sliced and diced and chopped up with commercials during prime time. This practice has been getting worse for decades, back to when ABC held the franchise.

Remember the 1980 Winter Olympics, when the United States men’s hockey team defeated the Soviet Union late one Friday afternoon in February? Most of the world got to see that game live but ABC then chose to show it on tape, in prime time, although it was a major news event.

ABC’s formula then – and NBC’s formula now – has remained remarkably unchanged for decades despite the development of cable television and live streaming video on the internet. If you want to see it on your real TV, you simply have to wait until NBC is good and ready to serve up you, the audience, as a product to its advertisers.]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/olympics-now-you-see-them-now-you-dont

RepubliKKKan Agenda

Achieve power to give more tax breaks to the already rich, power totally unconstrained by ethics or morality or notion off the common weal of our United States society.

Understand my high hopes for the Obama administration--little things like restoring the rule of law and closing the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp--but hope alone cannot create institutional change, especially with an anti-American party abusing filibuster rules in the Senate to prevent common sense strategies for creating jobs.

Only hard work over time by humans using people power to connect rather than nuclear money bombs from right wing billionaires, only several more election cycles and people putting forth progressive ideas and solutions.

For the love of La Follettes' ghosts, not even Michael Moore will vote this year for the Green Party candidate for President.

Olympics: "Always Look On the Bright Side of Life"

Humans Lie but Mitt Romney Takes It to Another Level

All humans have a capacity to lie, even me.  I lie to myself every morning to get out of bed, lying by choosing to believe any thing I can do will make my humble empire of dirt better.

(Then have to bribe myself 'cause without getting out of bed could not get my espresso, yogurt, granola, and eventually beer for happy hour.)

Nevertheless even though we all lie, some seem to develop an extreme capacity to tell bold faced lies and believe them as true, say like Joseph Smith and his Jesus just visited Kansas City meme.

Not to impugn all Mormons with the dishonesty shown by Mittens Romney.  As a class, they do well by others and make a lot of money.  Shoot, I'll trust a Mormon or true follower of Allah before some self proclaimed "Christian" ponzi schemer.

Still, Willard approaches psychopathic liar status, sort of like President Cheney except no alcohol or caffeine.

[I don't know the Republican candidate personally, but from a distance, it appears there's a part of his brain that allows him to create some kind of deliberate blind-spot. It's actually a little scary to think of a leader -- a man who'd be given enormous power and influence, literally making life and death decisions on a regular basis -- who can convince himself that his falsehoods are true, and that others' truths are falsehoods.]

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/17/13338337-chronicling-mitts-mendacity-vol-xxx?__utma=238145375.1166957157.1340218098.1344996653.1345236139.24&__utmb=238145375.0.10.1345236139&__utmc=238145375&__utmx=-&__utmz=238145375.1343326408.18.8.utmcsr=upwithchrishayes.msnbc.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/_news/2012/07/21/12877714-mitt-romney-and-federal-money-for-the-olympics&__utmv=238145375.|8=Earned%20By=cable%7Cmsnbc%7Crachel%20maddow%20show%7Crachel%20maddow%20show=1^12=Landing%20Content=Original=1^13=Landing%20Hostname=www.msnbc.msn.com=1^30=Visit%20Type%20to%20Content=Earned%20to%20Original=1&__utmk=65144557

What Does the Book of Mormon Say About Lying?

Because the few Bible translations just checked say don't bear false witness against your neighbor, in other words lie.

Nevertheless, Willard Mitt Romney really does lie a lot.

Don't get me wrong, this extremely cynical just turned 54 year old--who knew even at tender age of 10 Richard Nixon full of shit when he said he had a secret plan to end Second Indochinese War--has read The Selling of the President by Joe McGinniss and realized politicians in the age of mass media have to idealize themselves in certain ways, gain at least a sheen of common man as hero glow, and to  emphasize their positive attributes and minimize negatives.

Even as it turns out Nixon did have a secret plan, bomb the bejesus out of North Viet Nam and hope to thus bully their leaders while inflicting great devastation upon common people.  Nixon ignored the fact leaders safe in bomb shelters have an extraordinary capacity to endure the suffering of others.

Many folks listening to Tricky Dicky in the campaign of 1968 assumed he meant peace negotiations rather than biblical levels of destruction.

Recent history of the last campaign illustrates another aspect of the idealization process; voters tend to see candidates as transformational actors in the larger American polity without evaluating factors constraining the actions of a President: a recalcitrant House of Representatives, a minority party in the Senate abusing the filibuster to block any progress whatsoever, and even an activist, conservative Supreme Court.

Thus we see and read whiny, puling, progressive punks whining about Obama's inability to institute "our" liberal agenda.  Thanks, Suze.

For the rest of us living in the real world, we assume truth as a fundamental basis of human communication,  Otherwise, how would prehistoric humans tell each other facts to help human survival, stuff like you'll find water over the next ridge or run a big ass tiger coming this way.

Nevertheless in this age of mass mis-communication, our words have become un-moored from any truth whatsoever, as witnessed by current crop of TV ads run by Willard Mitt Romney lying about welfare waivers granted to governors of states which requested them, reviving Ronald Raygunz's canards on welfare queens.

At long last, Willard, have you no decency?

[So what does {Paul Waldman} think of Mitt Romney's new ad that claims President Obama has a plan for "dropping work requirements" for welfare? "Under Obama's plan," says the narrator, "you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."

"I've seen ads that were more inflammatory than this one, and ads that were in various ways more reprehensible than this one (not many, but some). But I cannot recall a single presidential campaign ad in the history of American politics that lied more blatantly than this one.

…Usually candidates deceive voters by taking something their opponent says out of context, or giving a tendentious reading to facts, or distorting the effects of policies. But in this case, Romney and his people looked at a policy of the Obama administration to allow states to pursue alternative means of placing welfare recipients in jobs, and said, "Well, how about if we just say that they're eliminating all work requirements and just sending people checks?" I have no idea if someone in the room said, "We could say that, but it's not even remotely true," and then someone else said, "Who gives a crap?", or if nobody ever suggested in the first place that this might be problematic. But either way, they decided that they don't even have to pretend to be telling the truth anymore.

This is what's so striking about Romney's campaign. As Paul says, it's common to twist and distort and cherry pick. But Romney has flatly claimed that Obama said something that, in fact, a John McCain aide said. He's snipped out sentences from an Obama speech and spliced the two halves back together so nobody could tell what he did. Then he did it again to another Obama speech. And he unequivocally said that Obama plans to drop work requirements for welfare even though he's done nothing of the sort."] emphasis in original
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/mitt-romney-sure-does-lie-lot-doesnt-he

Shorter Paul Ryan

http://www.first-draft.com/2012/08/shorter-paul-ryan.html

Tom Morello: 'Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against'

[Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn't understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn't understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.

Ryan claims that he likes Rage's sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

I wonder what Ryan's favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of "Fuck the Police"? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!

Don't mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta "rage" in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he's not raging against is the privileged elite he's groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

You see, the super rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend while millions of children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night. So, when they look themselves in the mirror, they convince themselves that "Those people are undeserving. They're . . . lesser." Some of these guys on the extreme right are more cynical than Paul Ryan, but he seems to really believe in this stuff. This unbridled rage against those who have the least is a cornerstone of the Romney-Ryan ticket.

But Rage's music affects people in different ways. Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit. For others, Rage has changed their minds and their lives. Many activists around the world, including organizers of the global occupy movement, were radicalized by Rage Against the Machine and work tirelessly for a more humane and just planet. Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening.

My hope is that maybe Paul Ryan is a mole. Maybe Rage did plant some sensible ideas in this extreme fringe right wing nut job. Maybe if elected, he'll pardon Leonard Peltier. Maybe he'll throw U.S. military support behind the Zapatistas. Maybe he'll fill Guantanamo Bay with the corporate criminals that are funding his campaign – and then torture them with Rage music 24/7. That's one possibility. But I'm not betting on it.]

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-morello-paul-ryan-is-the-embodiment-of-the-machine-our-music-rages-against-20120816#ixzz23olTho1Y

British Museum Online

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_image.aspx?objectId=406259&partId=1&searchText=greek+statues&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&numPages=10&currentPage=1&asset_id=33201

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx

Poor but Not Poor Enough: Life among the working poor in FL

[BY CARLA K. JOHNSON AND KELLI KENNEDY
ASSOCIATED PRESS

MIAMI -- Sandra Pico is poor, but not poor enough.

She makes about $15,000 a year, supporting her daughter and unemployed husband. She thought she'd be able to get health insurance after the Supreme Court upheld President Barack Obama's health care law.

Then she heard that her own governor won't agree to the federal plan to extend Medicaid coverage to people like her in two years. So she expects to remain uninsured, struggling to pay for her blood pressure medicine.

"You fall through the cracks and there's nothing you can do about it," said the 52-year-old home health aide. "It makes me feel like garbage, like the American dream, my dream in my homeland is not being accomplished."

Many working parents like Pico are below the federal poverty line but don't qualify for Medicaid, a decades-old state-federal insurance program. That's especially true in states where conservative governors say they'll reject the Medicaid expansion under Obama's health law.

In South Carolina, a yearly income of $16,900 is too much for Medicaid for a family of three. In Florida, $11,000 a year is too much. In Mississippi, $8,200 a year is too much. In Louisiana and Texas, earning more than just $5,000 a year makes you ineligible for Medicaid.

Governors in those five states have said they'll reject the Medicaid expansion underpinning Obama's health law after the Supreme Court's decision gave states that option. They favor small government and say they can't afford the added cost to their states even if it's delayed by several years. Some states estimate the expansion could ultimately cost them a billion dollars a year or more.

Many of the people affected by the decision are working parents who are poor - but not poor enough - to qualify for Medicaid.]
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/14/2951034/anti-medicaid-states-earning-11000.html#storylink=misearch

"Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I'll piss on 'em That's what the Statue of Bigotry says "

Quote from the inestimable Lou Reed, song "Dirty Boulevard," from the New York album.

Part of any civilization that shows ethical advancement comes from how that society treats those unable to contribute much to the general welfare: the elderly, infirm and disabled, the sick, poor, and even children deemed weak.  So although we may still celebrate the heroic sacrifice of the Spartan 300, no one would call them civilized for they threw weak babies to the wolves.

So also the Medicaid cuts proposed by Paul Ryan, Republican, state of plutocratic advantage, would harm the least available to help themselves: humans in Assisted Living Facilities, poor children, and the destitute.

In the great but penurious state of Florida, a family of 3 making less than $11,000 a year-below the federal poverty level--does not qualify for health care under Medicaid.

What do they do when their children get sick?

Hope, pray, wait for the malady to pass, and go to an Emergency Room if the sickness worsens.

The hospitals who accept poor patients--and make no mistake, some do not, which means people die every day in the US of un-Affordable health care because they lack insurance--bear the costs of treatment and pass those costs onto paying customers and insurance companies, which the Affodable Care Act will help prevent by getting people, human freakin' beings for God's sake, care before their conditions become acute.

Paul Ryan's budget, an immoral document if ever there were one, cuts $800 from Medicaid, cloaking this draconian dicing of the safety net by claiming it will give state governments more flexibility while knowing fool well--yes, I meant fool because if you believe these right wing Republican lies, you are a fool--and result in the states further cutting eligibility for Medicaid:

[By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON —
There's another Paul Ryan plan for health care, a fundamental change in caring for the poor and disabled that would affect many more people than the Medicare overhaul the GOP vice presidential candidate is best known for.

Under the Wisconsin congressman's Medicaid plan, states would take over the program. At the same time, Ryan's budget would reduce projected federal spending on Medicaid by about $800 billion over 10 years, dramatically shrinking it as a share of the national economy.

Medicaid serves about 60 million people, roughly 10 million more than Medicare. It's a diverse population brought together by need. Most Medicaid recipients are low-income children and their mothers, but the costliest cases are severely disabled people, many of them seniors in nursing homes.

Ryan would also repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, expected to add at least 11 million more people to Medicaid.

Ryan's Medicaid plan is in sync with his new boss, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.]
http://www.wftv.com/news/ap/top-news/the-other-paul-ryan-plan-800b-in-medicaid-cuts/nRBst/

Will this pass the test of helping those least able to help themselves?

Hell NO it won't!!!


Personal note #1:  Happened to work at hotel Lou stayed at when he came through the City Mean on his tour supporting this album.  Found it interesting contract called for in room refrigerator cleared of alcohol and to have no alcohol delivered to the room.
"Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I'll piss on 'em
That's what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death
And get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard"
Read more at http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/49609/#jO30k2XiwmjF3qUj.99

Personal note 2:  As a walking ex-quadrapeligic surviving for 32 years and oddly proud of eking out an existence on disability for the second time in my life (20 years working between stints), I have entered that range of middle age where one plays wheel of monthly medical specialist visits at $40 a copay pop even with medicare Advantage: gastroenterologist, urologist, neurologist, orthopedic surgeon, nephrologist, etc.  How the hell can I see more than 1 a month making the princely sum of $968 a month?

Personal note 3:  to all the bastards who judge me and assume and dare to say, "you should get some help," judging me because they assume some magical, faerie dust social safety net exists to help but I fall into odd category of not quite old enough at age 54 nor quite disabled enough to get social services help.

Sit on it, JJ.

"Radiation Is Good for You."

"I try to have 2 to 300 chest x-rays a year," says the mad scientist who stole the alien body in the movie Repo Man.

Good for mad scientists with an alien body in the trunk of their Chevy Nova, maybe.  Good for human beings and other flora and fauna?  Not so much.

Especially. apparently, for butterflies near Fukushima, Japan, perhaps serving as canaries in the nuclear reactors.

[Exposure to radioactive material released into the environment has caused mutations in butterflies found in Japan, a study suggests.

Scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident.

The link between the mutations and the radioactive material was shown by laboratory experiments, they report.

The work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Two months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, a team of Japanese researchers collected 144 adult pale grass blue (Zizeeria maha) butterflies from 10 locations in Japan, including the Fukushima area.

When the accident occurred, the adult butterflies would have been overwintering as larvae.

By comparing mutations found on the butterflies collected from the different sites, the team found that areas with greater amounts of radiation in the environment were home to butterflies with much smaller wings and irregularly developed eyes.

"It has been believed that insects are very resistant to radiation," said lead researcher Joji Otaki from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa.

"In that sense, our results were unexpected," he told BBC News.

It was by breeding these butterflies that they began noticing a suite of abnormalities that hadn't been seen in the previous generation - that collected from Fukushima - such as malformed antennae, which the insects use to explore their environment and seek out mates.Prof Otaki's team then bred these butterflies within labs 1,750km (1,090 miles) away from the accident, where artificial radiation could hardly be detected.

Six months later, they again collected adults from the 10 sites and found that butterflies from the Fukushima area showed a mutation rate more than double that of those found sooner after the accident.]  emphasis added
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19245818

Romney/Ryan: The Liar Picks the Fraud

The Romney/Ryan ticket already bores me; not even the fodder they provide for satire compensates for the absolute bankruptcy in their souls and paucity of ideas, their only real one the inbred desire to cut taxes for rich people and screw the rest.

Even having reached the august and ever more cynical age of 54, it just seems to me a political race for elected office should involve some degree of facts, some sort of telling truth to gain support of voters.

Even in 1969 in a campaign to sell Richard Nixon chronicled in the book The Selling of the President, Nixon proposed a War on Crime and marketed his secret plan to end the Viet Nam War.

Now, politics has entered a fact free age without the need for the so called "liberal media" (The Selling of the President) to call a lie a lie and a spade a spade.

Great Mencken's ghost, Willard Romney couldn't even tell the truth if it walked up, slapped him in the face, and signed his tax returns for him.

How could anyone with even a functioining brain cell left even think about voting for this feckless fool?  Even Fox "News" watching zombies should feel shame if they vote for this ticket.

Lies of Willard Romney part 29, literally, twenty-freakin'-nine: [Joe Klein reflected briefly on Mitt Romney this week, noting, "I can't remember a candidate so brazenly allergic to facts. What a travesty." Kevin Drum offered some related thoughts....

Of course, if months of distortions and lies causes irreparable harm to a presidential candidate, Romney might as well pack up and go to one of his mansions now. To consider this problem in more detail, consider the 29th installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity.

1. In a radio interview yesterday, Romney said of the president, "His campaign and the people working with him have focused almost exclusively on personal attacks."

That's both ironic and untrue.

2. In an attack ad launched this week, Romney said Obama "quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements."

This is as obvious a lie as any presidential candidate has ever told.]

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/10/13221172-chronicling-mitts-mendacity-vol-xxix?lite
[This morning on “This Week,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget plan a “fraud” as Romney campaign senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom confirmed his candidate’s support for the plan that would trim trillions in federal spending over the next decade.

“The Ryan plan — and I guess this is what counts as a personal attack — but it isn’t. It’s not an attack on the person; it’s an attack on the plan. The plan’s a fraud,” said Krugman. “And so to say that — just tell the truth that there is really no plan there, neither from Ryan, nor from Governor Romney, is just the truth. That’s not — if that’s — if that’s being harsh and partisan, gosh, then I guess the truth is anti-bipartisanship. ”

Krugman, who has been critical of the Ryan, R-Wis., plan in the past, was responding to the Fehrnstrom, who confirmed Romney’s support for the plan after ABC News’ George Will asked Fehrnstrom to clarify his candidate’s stance on the Ryan proposal.

“He’s for the Ryan plan."]
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/paul-krugman-paul-ryan-budget-that-romney-supports-is-a-fraud/