FourScore

FourScore's Journal

September 27, 2012

New video from Mother Jones: According to Mitt Romney, Bain aims to "harvest" companies at a profit

Harvesting companies. Wow.

September 27, 2012

“They’re out of feed, they’re out of pasture, they’re out of water"

To the mods: Daily Kos allows us to cross-post diaries in their entirety.

Thu Sep 27, 2012 at 01:25 AM PDT
“They’re out of feed, they’re out of pasture, they’re out of water"
by praenomen
David Horsey posted an excellent commentary in yesterday's online issue of the L.A. Times. Under the heading: Republicans have a medieval mindset about climate change, Horsey says:

In California, plans are being made for the decades ahead when coastal highways are swamped, Yosemite waterfalls run dry, agricultural areas turn to dust, the San Francisco airport floods and the famous beaches near Los Angeles are reclaimed by the Pacific. (all emphasis in this article mine)

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/lat-na-tt-medieval-mindset-20120925,0,6709952.story

If you live in the Southland, then the early symptoms of climate change are familiar. Twenty of the first twenty-one days of this month have exceeded normal September temperatures. Two of those days -- the 14th and the 15th -- exceeded mean temperature by 20 plus degrees.

But we are not alone. Dramatic heat spikes have occurred in other parts of our country. Sixty-three percent of the contiguous United States has been suffering from drought. Already, in 2012 -- as of July 13th -- over 40,000 heat records in the United States have been broken. That is 15,000 more cases than were recorded in 2011 (the hottest year on record).

The intense heat is beginning to impact our food supplies. That is why you have been reading about the looming "Aporkalypse." And while it is too early to know yet if there will be an actual shortage of pork, we do know that feed supplies and water resources for livestock and farm animals have been disappearing at an alarming rate.

The depletion of grazing land for cattle and the lack of feed (specifically, corn) for hogs is forcing cattlemen and farmers to intentionally increase the number of animals they are sending to market, essentially reducing the size of future herds.

“I’m holding right now, but I don’t know, if I don’t get some water, can’t hold, can’t keep on a holding,” said Larry Springfield, a cattle raiser in Springtown. “They’re out of feed, they’re out of pasture, they’re out of water, so what else are you going to do with them.”

Ultimately, the drought will affect what customers will pay for beef at the grocery store, cattle owners said.

Since a mature cow only has one calf per year, it will take years for the ranchers to rebuild their herds. That could cause the price of beef [to] go up as early as the end of this year.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/27/1132416/--They-re-out-of-feed-they-re-out-of-pasture-they-re-out-of-water

Chris Hurt, a Purdue University agricultural economist, recently told Indiana farmers that the drought of 2012 “could become the second-most expensive weather event ever, ranking behind only Hurricane Katrina.”

From Boston.com

BOSTON -- The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday declared a national fishery disaster in New England, opening the door for tens of millions of dollars in relief funds for struggling fishermen and their ports.

Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank said the declaration comes amid "unexpectedly slow rebuilding of stocks," which is forcing huge fishing cuts for 2013 that are jeopardizing the New England industry. Blank said her agency also determined the troubles with fish stocks have come even though fishermen are following rules designed to prevent overfishing.

http://www.boston.com/business/news/2012/09/13/feds-declare-fishery-disaster-new-england/qwxJkv7lUFFFlM4HjS0Y7H/story.html...

Salon magazine recently reported that some U.S. farmers are resorting to extreme measures to keep their livestock fed:

Cows Fed Candy - "With corn nearly $9 a bushel due to the drought, Nick Smith, the co-owner of United Livestock Commodities in Kentucky, said his farm had to come up with a cheaper way to feed his cattle. The remedy? A concoction of candy rejected for human consumption, an ethanol byproduct and a mineral nutrient.

Joseph Watson, also a co-owner of the farm, said, “Just to be able to survive, we have to look for other sources of nutrition.”

From the Independent, U.K.:

Food price spikes caused by extreme weather events like the US drought will become the norm over the next twenty years, leading to millions of deaths from malnutrition among the world’s poorest if Governments do not act on climate change, Oxfam has warned.

While the average price of staple foods is already expected to double in the next twenty years, the UK’s leading poverty charity predicts that separate catastrophes such as droughts, floods and bad harvests will also become more common as a result of climate change, leading to regular and dramatic jumps in prices.

The world stands at a critical juncture. The effects of climate change are accelerating and the predicted rise in global temperatures will have an increasingly devastating impact on food security, human settlement and our ability to survive as a people and a planet.

Yahoo News

NOTE: Initially, when food and water supplies disappear, many vulnerable biological species become extinct. And since every link in nature is interdependent, the remaining species are threatened by the disappearance of any part of its ecosystem.

Here is a partial list of endangered species (scroll down):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_species...

Humans are not exempt from this domino effect. Some very important parts of our food chain are on life support and we should take notice,

A shortage of food is just one of the crises facing our children and grandchildren if we don't take immediate action to reverse global warming.

Edited to include this comment by Dave Horsey:

If we lived in a rational society, any Republican who insisted climate change is not real would be as shamed and ostracized as the backwoods snake-handlers in the GOP congressional caucus who say a woman cannot be impregnated if she is raped. As a country, we should all be embarrassed. Americans, not the Dutch, should be leading the world in dealing with the imminent calamities being brought on by the rise in global temperatures. But we will not be able to take the lead until one of our two major political parties stops shilling for the big energy companies and abandons its medieval scorn of science.

6:39 AM PT: Many thanks to Neapolitan who updated the 40,000 number of broken heat records listed in the diary.

Just an update: as of yesterday, the U.S. has seen 56,120 record daily high (or high minimum) temperatures this year. More tellingly, it's seen just 10,581 record daily low (or low maximums). That's a very lopsided high-to-low ratio of 5.3 to 1.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/27/1132416/--They-re-out-of-feed-they-re-out-of-pasture-they-re-out-of-water

September 23, 2012

ALTERNET: Mitt Romney's ROLE AS MORMON BISHOP Shows His EXTEMIST Religious Beliefs

AlterNet / By Nancy L. Cohen
Mitt Romney's Role as Mormon Bishop Shows His Extremist Religious Beliefs
Romney has consistently avoided having his Mormon beliefs put under scrutiny. There are some good reasons for that.
September 15, 2012

One winter day, far along into her pregnancy with her second child, 21-year-old Peggy Hayes received a phone call from Willard Mitt Romney. He wanted to talk to her, he said. Could he come over?

Hayes, the divorced, unmarried mother of a 3-year-old daughter, was struggling as a nurse’s aide in a working-class suburb of Boston. She had little in common with the successful Bain executive, but the request wasn’t as odd as it might seem. Hayes was a Mormon. Romney was her bishop. Romney walked into her small apartment, made small talk and then commanded her to give her baby up for adoption after it was born. He was her bishop, and as she knew, Mormonism disapproved of single motherhood. Hayes said no.

“Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,” Romney said, according to Hayes in an interview with Boston Globe journalists Michael Kranish and Scott Helman. Romney denied he made that threat, although he did not dispute the incident...

SNIP

...Chosen as a kind of enforcer-in-chief, Romney betrayed a zeal far beyond the call of duty. Bishop Romney tried to stop a mother of four whose health was seriously endangered by her pregnancy from having an abortion. The church allows abortion in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother, provided a male LDS authority gives permission to the pregnant woman. Romney's superior had already told the woman to proceed for the sake of her health; Romney intervened. Romney refused to allow an infertile couple to take advantage of the LDS adoption service until the wife agreed to quit her job and be a stay-at-home mother. Other reliable reports of Mitt’s years as a Mormon clergyman have him excommunicating adulterers, calling homosexuals under his authority “perverse,” warning a middle-aged divorced woman that she was not allowed to have sex, and telling a leading Mormon feminist, “You’re not my kind of Mormon...”

MORE AT: http://www.alternet.org/belief/mitt-romneys-role-mormon-bishop-shows-his-extremist-religious-beliefs?paging=off

September 21, 2012

Ann Romney is sick of you people not understanding how hard it is to be Ann Romney

Fri Sep 21, 2012 at 08:15 AM PDT
Ann Romney is sick of you people not understanding how hard it is to be Ann Romney
by Kaili Joy Gray

Ann Romney is once again up on her gold-plated cross, and she's got another message for the ingrates out there who don't appreciate how hard it is to be her:

During an interview early this evening with Radio Iowa, Mrs. Romney directly addressed her fellow Republicans who’ve criticized her husband.

“Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring,” she said. “This is hard and, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now and it’s an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.”

Ann has told "you people" time and time again to leave Mitt alone, stop asking questions, and just be grateful that he's willing to run for president. Shut up and show a little appreciation for the Romneys and their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice—passing up constant $30 million-a-year job offers, even though "poor guy, he took no pay when he did the Olympics for three years and no pay when he was governor for four years."

She's tried to make women get it:

"Women, you need to wake up," she urged them. "Women have to ask themselves who's going to have and be there for you. I can promise you, I know, that Mitt will be there for you. He will stand up for you, he will hear your voices."

She's tried to make Latinos get it:

You’d better really look at your future and figure out who’s going to be the guy that’s going to make it better for you and your children, and there is only one answer...

...It really is a message that would resonate well if they could just get past some of their biases that have been there from the Democratic machines that have made us look like we don’t care about this community.

But no. You people just won't let up, with the mockery of the Romneys' car elevator; with the questions about all those millions stashed away in secret bank accounts; with the outright disgust at Ann's tales of woe about struggling to survive on Mitt's inherited stock portfolio.

But you people—you women, you Latinos, you Democrats and now you Republicans—just don't get it. You're so mean and classless with all your questions and doubt and disgust. Heck, that's why Ann so astutely noted:

My horse has more style and more class in its hoof than they do in their whole deal.

Ugh. You people. You just have no idea how hard it is to be Ann. Just stop it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/21/1134767/-Ann-Romney-is-sick-of-you-people-not-understanding-how-hard-it-is-to-be-Ann-Romney

September 21, 2012

Whoa. I hadn't seen this video of Romney yet.

Way to flaunt it.

September 21, 2012

Hey Scott Brown... Am I 'Indian' Enough For You?

Fri Sep 21, 2012 at 05:51 AM PDT
Hey Scott Brown... Am I 'Indian' Enough For You?
by LieparDestin

This is me. By Brown's standards, I am an even whiter-guy than he is.

This is my father. He named me 'Kiowa'. Literally. That is my name. Sorry it is not more 'white' like 'Scott' or something.

Do you need to see my papers Mr Brown? It is people like you that likely caused me to become a Democrat in the first place. I grew up all the time with people telling my father he needs to cut his hair, go back to the reservation, making 'indian noises', Dances-with-wolves references, etc.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/21/1134738/-Hey-Scott-Brown-Am-I-Indian-Enough-For-You

September 20, 2012

Nate Silver's Now-cast: POTUS at 94.4%

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/19/1134143/-Nate-Silver-s-Now-cast-POTUS-at-94-4

Wed Sep 19, 2012 at 06:27 PM PDT
Nate Silver's Now-cast: POTUS at 94.4%
by ericlewis0

Short but sweet:

94.4% !!!!! To Romney's 5.6%.
Pretty sure that's the highest this number has been. It represents President Obama's chances if the election were held today.

Nate's Nov.6 forecast also has a new bounce for POTUS - back up to better than three-to-one odds.
Obama: 75.2%, Romney: 24.8%
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

Donate to re-elect President Obama here:
http://www.barackobama.com

September 19, 2012

The Obama administration has released a video of people watching and reacting to Mitt's speech

Take a look:

September 19, 2012

ROFLMAO!!! You gotta see this Colbert video about the Romney tape!

Colbert at his best!!

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/419186/september-18-2012/mitt-romney-s-secret-video?xrs=share_copy

September 19, 2012

It's time for Mitt Romney to prove he pays taxes

Mon Sep 17, 2012 at 08:30 PM PDT
It's time for Mitt Romney to prove he pays taxes
by NMDad

This is a pretty simple idea that won't take a lot of space to put forward.

In Mitt's fundraising video he slandered nearly half the country, referring to them as, to paraphrase, freeloading moochers who pay no income tax.

Well, I think it's time to renew our demands, to forcefully renew our demands, that Mitt Romney prove he's paid taxes. He is slandering American citizens. He, as a multi-millionaire, is smugly standing there among other millionaires and rudely defaming the poorest (and in my experience, often the hardest working) people in this country.

If he's going to say those people are only looking for a government hand out and use the lie that they "don't pay taxes" as a justification for vilifying them, then he needs to prove that he's paid his. This country needs to demand that Mitt Romney release his tax records immediately, and we need to do it loudly. And we need to never let up until he's either released them or he's lost the election.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/17/1133087/-It-s-time-for-Mitt-Romney-to-prove-he-pays-taxes

Profile Information

Member since: Thu Mar 16, 2006, 03:07 PM
Number of posts: 9,704

1 2 3 Next »