One of the most common and alarming is bisphenol-A,better known as BPA. The failure to regulate it means that it is unavoidable. BPA is found in everything from plastics to canned food to A.T.M. receipts. More than 90 percent of Americans have it in their urine.

Even before the latest research showing multigeneration effects, studies had linked BPA to breast cancer and diabetes, as well as to hyperactivity, aggression and depression in children.

source: Big Chem, Big Harm? – NYTimes.com.

Here’s an excerpt:

A poll this spring by the Pew Economic Mobility Project underscored how minorities and whites see their divergent economic trajectories. Whites earning between $25,000 and $75,000 per year were more than twice as likely as blacks in the same income range—and nearly twice as likely as Latinos—to say they had already achieved the American Dream. A majority of Latinos and a plurality of African-Americans say they expect to be making enough money 10 years from now to live the lifestyle they desire. A majority of whites consider that a pipe dream.

Working-class whites, in other words, are already more prosperous and secure than working-class minorities, but they’re less optimistic because they don’t believe they’re climbing anymore. They’re simply trying to hold on to what they’ve got, and see others grabbing at it.

Thanks to Romney, they see minorities grabbing at their way of life every day and all day in the inaccurate welfare ad. It opens with a picture of Bill Clinton (a man obsessed with Macomb County and Reagan Democrats) signing the 1996 welfare reform act, which shifted the benefits from indefinite government assistance to one pushing people into employment and self-reliance.

source: Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card – Ron Fournier – NationalJournal.com.

White working class voters already think the future is bleak and have the least affinity for the President so Romney/Ryan figures they can tell them that Barack Obama’s welfare queens and strapping young bucks are the ones who are going to make that bleak future come true.

The welfare waiver came in response to a request from GOP governors, and objections to it first resided deep in the land of conservative think tanks. Romney rolled out this strategy — and the Medicare one — only after polls seemed to be showing Obama with a small but persistent lead despite months of Romney attacks over the economy.

At any rate, Fournier has confirmed from GOP strategists that angering blue collar whites is the goal of this strategy. We also know that the GOP has a history of using race-based messaging to appeal to this constituency. And we know Romney probably can’t win unless he pushes his white vote totals to record levels — hence the pollster’s claim that these attacks could make a difference on the margins.

source: Ron Fournier: Romney is playing a racial game – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.

A guy like Romney is literally thinking: “what’s a little racial resentment between white working class voters and black people when there’s an election to win?”

Okay, That’s the Stupidest Thing I Ever Heard | TPM Editors Blog.

Chuck Todd ‘s moment of insanity: “Democrats wish they had the diversity of speakers and deep bench [of the GOP] to show America …”

Democrats don’t need to show America our diversity all of a sudden. We already have it in people’s neighborhoods all the time.

The CHC, CBC and CAPAC are all mostly dems. That’s Hispanic, Asian and black caucuses.

The first LGBT mayor of a major city? Democrat. Woman Senators? Democrats have more than double the Republicans at this time.

Democratic US Reps? Many more Dems. Not to mention Minority Leader Pelosi and James Clyburn is in leadership.

The only place I see Republicans leading is in the space of female governors and that includes some real gems like Jan Brewer and Nikki Haley. Democrats numbers suffer because like any administration they asked some Dems to vacate their governorship to serve the current administration (Obama pulled Janet Napolitano (DHS) and Kathleen Sebelius (DHHS)) out of their governorship to serve the White House).

Now can we all work on electing more women to executive offices? Yes. Should we have more diversity in the senate? Yes. But is there in some way a dearth of diversity in the Democratic party compared to the Republican party? Hell no.

There may be another reason there is an over-orchestrated show of party diversity at the RNC:

Carroll said no one took the names of the attendees who threw peanuts at her Tuesday on the convention floor and told her, “This is what we feed animals.” She alerted fellow camera operators, producers and CNN security. The head of the delegation — she was not certain of the state — told her the perpetrators must have been alternates, not delegates.

But Carroll, 34, said that as an Alabama native, she was not surprised. “This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South,” she said. “You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don’t think I should do.”

Carroll noted of the Republican convention, “There are not that many black women there.”

She said she wanted to thank CNN, which “has been behind me 100 percent.” Although she was stationed on the floor next to Fox News, she was not operating the camera at the time. The perpetrators “didn’t know what I was doing. I happened to be standing there,” near one of the delegations.

Two people were removed from the Republican National Convention Tuesday after they threw nuts at an African-American CNN camera operator and said, “This is how we feed animals.”

Multiple witnesses observed the exchange and RNC security and police immediately removed the two people from the Tampa Bay Times Forum.

source: Two people removed from RNC after taunting black camera operator – CNN Political Ticker – CNN.com Blogs.

And they wonder why black people tend to not vote republican.

The Paulites are so naive:

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation! As Maine goes, so goes the nation!” protestors shouted in unison, a reference to demands that the RNC seat Paul delegates who the state party replaced with Mitt Romney supporters.

“We got railroaded by a freight train of hypocrisy,” James Martin, a Paul delegate from Virginia, told TPM. “We’re trying to raise the integrity of the Republican Party, and if they won’t do it from the top down, we’ll do it from the bottom up.”

The Paul contingency waited until after the Paul-centric convention opening had concluded before the protest got under way.

The convention began Wednesday night with a film showing clips of various Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Jim DeMint, Mike Lee and Mitch McConnell, praising Paul’s small-government vision.

Did they really think they would be given a fair hearing at RNC 2012?

Voters in Ohio won’t be punished for poll worker mistakes and errors.

Sullivan as recently as earlier this year was calling Paul Ryan “serious”, Romney’s campaign and the Romney/Ryan lie fest has shown him the light:

The simple assumption of racial politics as the driver of campaigns is what’s striking. Karl Rove became what he is – a persistent whitehead on the face of American politics – because he learned the art of race-baiting politics in the South. Romney – having given up on Lainos and blacks and gays – is now betting the bank on the white resentment that has been fast losing potency since the 1990s. Which is where Bill Clinton comes in. He is used in that ad. His speech at the DNC should take on this lie aggressively, call Romney personally on it, and demand that the lie end. No one has more cred on this than Clinton. He should punch hard.

source: Last Call For The Race Card – And Bill Clinton’s Opportunity – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast.

When people says don’t need the government to help poor people, let charity do it they mean: we will shrink the government and starve the charity to.

Upset with the decision, Sister Mary Scullion, Philadelphia’s nationally known homelessness expert, said cutting the program offers “a short-term gain for the state to save money.”

“But there’ll be long-term pain,” she said, “as more people wind up in shelters, resorting to crime to get money for food, then winding up in prisons, now the largest mental hospitals in the United States.”

Scullion said she did not understand why the state was eliminating a chance for people to access federal dollars that would be spent in the region, aiding the local economy. “It’s counterproductive,” she said.

The money that was cut had been used by the Advocacy Project to administer SOAR, a national program that streamlines and significantly speeds the SSI application process, which can normally take as long as two years.

SSI recipients can get as much as $698 a month, often enough to help a person get out of a homeless shelter and into an apartment, experts on homelessness say.

source: Pa. cuts funding for Phila. program for the disabled homeless – Philly.com.

It’s about fiscal sanity as much as voter id is about voter fraud: it’s not. It’s about f*cking people in Democratic voter bases and redirecting federal money towards their voting base.

Romney started a campaign speech in Michigan with this:

I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised. Where both of us were born … No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.Now, it’s unquestionably true that Mitt Romney isn’t a birther. He knows that President Obama was born in the United States and is fully eligible to serve as President of the United States.

But that isn’t an excuse, it’s an indictment.

source Romney’s Birther “Joke” Wasn’t a Joke..

It feels like the media is twisting around trying to make excuses for their grandfather’s comment hinting at some racist idea. Birtherism is about race and the campaign decided to test out this line to see how it would play with the base.

And really the question: where are your tax returns are some questions Romney never will answer. It’s not never having to be asked, it’s never having to answer and everyone being ok with that.

Navy SEAL has written and published a book that is a narrative of the top secret Bin Laden raid.. Somehow, it will be Obama’s fault.

Krugman wonders if anyone decided to actual check Niall Ferguson’s sources before his story was published:

Now, I don’t expect a publication that responds to daily or weekly news to do New Yorker-style fact checking. But it should demand that anyone who writes for it document all of his or her factual assertions – and an editor should check that documentation to see that it actually matches what the writer says.

source: Kinds Of Wrong – NYTimes.com.

Paul Krugman is the (Shr)illest.