Tonight Massachusetts voters get their first chance to watch Senate candidates Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown go head-to-head in a televised debate.

The debate, which is hosted by WBZ-TV's Jon Keller, is the first in a series of four that will take place throughout the next month across the state. And in a race that has stayed as consistently close as this one, these debates offer both candidates a chance to break through and gain a solid lead in the polls.

"Debates usually don't change minds. Typically, they reinforce attitudes that are already there," says Jeffrey Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "But the race is close, and a gaffe by one could be enough to even up the preferences right now which show Warren slightly up."

While recent polls have shown Warren with a slight advantage, in the deeply blue state of Massachusetts the toss-up status of the race is not what Democrats had hoped for at this stage in the game. Democrats have long viewed the Massachusetts seat, currently held by Republican Scott Brown, as one of if not their best chance for a pick-up in the general election. Republicans need a net gain of four seats in the Senate to win the majority, and a Democratic pick-up in Massachusetts makes that path to the majority much harder for the GOP. Tonight's debate could tip the scales in either direction.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/scott-brown-elizabeth-warren-square-off-debate-tonight/story?id=17274188#.UFsNo47v3bx

Poll: Romney Still Doing Well With Voters Who Have Never Heard Him Speak

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney got a rare piece of good news today, as a new poll showed him faring well among voters who have never heard him speak.

According to the poll, which has a margin of error of three points, Mr. Romney garnered positive ratings among voters who agreed with the statement, “I have never seen Mitt Romney say or do anything.”

The poll showed Mr. Romney doing especially well among certain demographic groups, including people who had been trapped in a mine cave-in or who had recently awoken from a coma.

For Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades, the poll results offer “an amazing opportunity” for the campaign: “We have to identify those voters who have never heard Mitt talk and make sure they never do.”


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/09/poll-romney-still-doing-well-with-voters-who-have-never-heard-him-speak.html#ixzz26wLOG1Nb

Columbus Daily Tribune

Romney says “I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”

This, I think, reveals much more about the delusional mind of Mitt Romney than anything else he said. It is one thing to be so out of touch with the lives of most Americans that you think 47% of them are lazy good-for-nothings. It is quite another to be so out of touch with your own life that you think you all the money you made was totally independent. Not just independent of the government either, but independent even of your own extraordinarily privileged upbringing.

As should be commonly known now, Romney is the son of a millionaire auto executive who was also governor of Michigan. His wife admitted that Mitt and she paid their way through college by selling off some of Mitt’s stock holdings. Mitt attended a private high school, the best universities, and received all the boosts that come along with being born into a very well-connected, very high-income white family. To suggest that has nothing to do with where he wound up in life — which is what he is getting at in this part of his speech — is on its face ridiculous.

It does however give a window into reality as Republicans and the super-rich see it. They are blinded by the massive advantages many of them had, which helped them get where they are. They just flatly reject the picture that factors outside of one’s control — for example who one’s parents are — have a huge amount to do with individual success. They truly do believe, even in the most extreme circumstances like Romney, that their own individual merit accounts for everything they ever got (so long of course as they forego their inheritance).

The obvious influence of unfair factors and luck are totally erased from this delusional world. Everyone gets everything they deserve. If you are rich, it’s because your awesome. If you are poor, it’s because you suck. And nothing should disturb that balance. Romney’s comments about the 47% are clearly disconnected from the lived reality of most Americans, but it’s a reality he has never experienced. More troubling to me is his disconnect from his own lived reality, on top of which he has built a fantastical story of purely independent, bootstrapping wealth accumulation.


http://mattbruenig.com/2012/09/18/the-hidden-gem-in-romneys-disaster-speech/


The divine right of kings

Just a reminder that 400 Americans have more wealth that the bottom 50% of the country and In 2011, 7000 millionaires paid no income tax. its still about the one percent.
and that' was Romney's crowd

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3056

The Antarctic krill population has declined by 80% since the 1970s, and without them the entire ecosystem of the Southern Ocean will collapse.




Antarctic krill feed on algae and phytoplankton that are suspended in the water column. They are preyed upon by nearly every Antarctic predator that exists. And if a predator doesn't eat krill, it feeds on the ones that do. A penguin's diet consists of nearly 100 percent krill. Blue whales rely on krill for almost all of their dietary requirement. During the summer months, an adult blue whale eats up to 40 million krill in a single day to fulfill its 1.5 million kilocalorie nutritional needs. Antarctic krill is the keystone species in the Southern Ocean, and without it, the ecosystem would collapse.

Antarctic krill use intensive searching and rapid feeding techniques to take advantage of high plankton concentrations. Krill form dense schools that move horizontally in the water column when feeding. Krill spend their days avoiding predators in the cold depths of the Southern Ocean. At night, they drift up toward the surface to search for phytoplankton


Recent studies show Antarctic krill stocks have dropped by as much as 80 percent since the 1970s. Scientists attribute this decline in part to ice cover loss caused by global warming. This ice loss removes ice algae from the Southern Ocean which is a primary source of food for krill. NASA satellite data reveals that there has been continuous ice loss from Antarctica since 2002—more than 100 cubic kilometers of ice per year.






http://weeklysciencequiz.blogspot.dk/2012/09/the-keystone-species-of-southern-ocean.html

COSTA MESA, Calif. — Around 4 p.m. Monday here, an aide to Mitt Romney showed him a grainy video that had been circulating online all afternoon.

It was not pleasant viewing.

On a day freighted with symbolism and expectancy, the 50th until the election, Mr. Romney quietly watched himself deliver words at a fund-raiser — about the “47 percent,” “victims” and “dependents” — that would cast a new cloud over his campaign.

Mr. Romney and his advisers quickly grasped the severity of the footage, shot surreptitiously in Florida a few months ago and suddenly dominating the cable news airwaves and political blogs.

A decision was made: Mr. Romney must go in front of cameras that night to explain himself, lest questions about the video linger and overshadow two full days of his campaign at a crucial stage in the general election.

But there was little time. It was already 7 p.m. on the East Coast, after the evening newscasts, and Mr. Romney was scheduled to attend a major fund-raiser in Costa Mesa in a few hours........


SNIP


http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/how-the-romney-campaign-scrambled-to-respond-to-secret-video/