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.

Niall Ferguson will still be a respected columnist for The Daily Beast/Newsweek despite publishing a featured article without empirically supporting his thesis or telling the truth. Fareed Zakaria‘s plagiarism has been relegated to his HR file as he has been reinstated after TIME and CNN found it wasn’t that bad even though he also has a one size fits all commencement speech. Both of them will be featured speakers at some conference, like Davos, Aspen Ideas Festival or some other resort party because in despite of their actual work, they are both “one of our” most valued public intellectuals.

Public intellectuals meaning Ferguson, Zakaria and other world renowned academics who have a successful media strategy, demand the highest fees from their speakers bureaus and attempt to launder stolen material or build arguments back from their own personal biases, re-use their own work without attribution while cultivating a reputation of having an important brain. Though they have repeatedly failed when it comes to rigor, they have succeeded when it comes to wooing the “Our”. “Our” is not the citizens of the world “our”. “Our” is the salon organizers, idea cruise planners, conference sponsors and chairmen who decide whose words are interesting enough to hear. Invites from “Our” are sent to these public intellectuals so that they can be conference keynote speaker and to be invited over to the house for dinner and cocktails . These same “Our” use these “valued intellectuals” as shields of culpability: well one of our leading intellectuals agreed with me, so who could-a known?

So even when Krugman is shrill because he is upset George W. Bush lied us into an Iraq War with the aid of a delinquent congress, Bob Herbert is boring because he talks so much about poor people with indignant tone, you must remember: Fareed Zakaria is modest and correct when he basically says he is doing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s job already and Niall Ferguson is a delightful “swashbuckling” thinker that believes such provocative things like: colonialism and proxy wars are the best is worth like 75K per speech.

Even though Zakaria has resigned from Yale, Ferguson’s continued tenure is good for Harvard students: if you sit in one of Ferguson’s lectures, you’ve gotten more than your money’s worth for the year.

“Free ball so hard the FBI wanna fine me! First Cantor gotta find me!

What’s the Sea of Galilee to the Tea Party? Can you please remind me?”

Let’s play Jeopardy. The category? #TeaPartyInTiberias!

A: Tea Party Congressional Caucus Republicans on a trip led by Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to Israel

Q: What do you call 30 or so male congressional colleagues who skinny dip with staffers after dinner in biblical holy waters while on an official trip sponsored by AIPAC?

The FBI has investigated GOP freshman lawmakers who took a booze-fueled late-night swim in the Sea of Galilee — one of them completely in the buff.
The website Politico named six Republican congressmen, including Staten Island Rep. Michael Grimm, who participated in the Holy Land shenanigans. But the website said up to 20 lawmakers and senior aides were in on the hijinks.

But Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) admitted that he took off all his clothes and dived into the sea that the Bible says Jesus walked on.
The incident took place on Aug. 18, 2011, during a fact-finding mission to Israel headed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Also, leave to House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor to be redundant and behind the curve:

Politico reported that Rep. Steve Southerland of Florida and his 19-year-old daughter also took part in the late-night dip in the holy waters. Also named was upstate Rep. Tom Reed as taking part in the swim.
The incident left Cantor livid and prompted him to give his colleagues a dressing-down

Silly Majority Leader Cantor, they were already dressed down, dummy! You’re all wet! Er, rather, they were all wet with these folks:

Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.) and his daughter; Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) and his wife; Reps. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) and Michael Grimm (R-N.Y)

Is this how Ben Quayle unwinds after working so hard to “knock the hell out of Washington” (whoever that is)?Also, Remember the big deal with Jon Favreau?. Favreau was on his spare time when he was kicking it without a shirt and it was representative of the Obama White House’s “amateurism”. These idiots were on an official trip in Israel and decided to treat a holy site like the hot tub at a Sandals Resort.

Well we know this: Tampa, get ready! 30 wild and crazy guys and 10 of thousands of their closest friends are on their way!

I really hope that a guy who thinks illegitimate rape is an scientific intelligent designy phenomena would have a hard time winning statewide election in any state. I hope.

It’s well known that in many developing countries with autocratic regimes, they treasuries are used as slush funds for dictators:

The thing is, we can only point to these details because SCB and HSBC, because of Lawsky and Levin’s efforts, have undergone more transparency than all the other banks helping dictators strip their country’s wealth. Regulators apparently want to keep us from knowing how much purportedly respectable banks help these dictators to shore up their own power and loot their countries. Moreover, they only want to penalize these banks for a tiny fraction of the business they do with these dictators even after they’ve been sanctioned.

source: You Don’t Suppose All These Dictators Have Been Looting with SCB’s and HSBC’s Help? | emptywheel.

It isn’t just the guy at the top, a lot of these celebrated “defectors” and the like during these conflicts are guys who see everything crumbling and want to be on the winning side so they can stay winning. Also, we always hear about what a bear regulation is, but we never hear how it helps to litigate or wind down financial institutions like MF Global, because it doesn’t:

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

[…]

In the most telling indication yet that the MF Global investigation is winding down, federal authorities are seeking to interview the former chief of the firm, Jon S. Corzine, next month, according to the people involved in the case. Authorities hope that Mr. Corzine, who is expected to accept the invitation, will shed light on the actions of other employees at MF Global.

source: No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global – NYTimes.com.

I don’t really know what to say, but it seems to me if you say “I’m professionally responsible” for something, and you let that something be stolen or taken, you should be penalized for it. I understand the argument is “we don’t know where the money is”, but they should know where the money is. It’s their job. If you are a Professional Engineer and you design a building or bridge and it collapses shortly after it’s construction, you suffer criminal penalties and a permanent professional accreditation revocation because you are the person who signed off on the plans. If you run a business for customers to invest money and money disappears, you get to have a nice conversation. I’m not saying investors should never lose money, but you the burden should be on the professional who issues the prospectus to clients. In addition, maybe the SEC should hold onto some documents:

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term “Orwellian,” devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or “Matters Under Inquiry” – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission’s internal website. “After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation,” the site advised staffers, “you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI.”

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

source: Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

Tomorrow, we should go outside because 40% of us adults haven’t walked for ten minutes in a week:

There’s a new report out from the Centers for Disease Control that finds nearly 40 percent of American adults had not walked for a ten-minute period in the previous seven days. Yikes.

source: Walking Rates in America Improve, Still Pitiful | Streetsblog.net.

It’s really different phenomena these days. Or at least it seems to be. The deal was summer time in the 80’s when I was a kid and into my teens going to the early 90’s we would go outside and play pick up anything. All the time. Ride bikes or just go get into some kind of trouble. I know I live in downtown Philly, but you can go to basketball courts, baseball and football fields (nearest to me is this one) and find them largely empty all summer.

We (voters) often have a big problem with our mayors proposing cuts to libraries, pools, and parks because we want these things to be available for children today. We (communities) have a big problem getting people, especially young people, to go out and use them. Part of that is walking, exercising and play habits that may be getting worse generation by generation. It’s especially bad for young girls of color.

No clue what to do except to go outside.

Really awkward.

“Trust me”

Doesn’t the fact that this are two media narratives that exist kinda tell you that too many journalists we all get our news from farm their data research out to pr reps?

Maybe every climate scientist should take up P90X.