WAXING GIBBOUS MOON

The picture shows the moon as it looked when I walked tonight.

Waxing gibbous moon
The words themselves a poem
Turning full moon soon

A repost which I use from time to time when the gibbous moon shines in the night sky.

HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it passing strange that the name of the most recent Republican occupant of the Oval Office is never mentioned by the members of his own party, not even in whispers?  Republicans reach back to Ronald Reagan and even as far back as Abraham Lincoln, but George W Bush has been effectively airbrushed out of Republican history.  W has not been seen nor heard from during the campaign, nor at the convention.  Which Republican candidate for public office trumpets an endorsement from George W Bush?  He's the invisible man.  Come to think of it, the Republicans are silent about W's father, George H W Bush as well.  It's as though the two presidencies never happened.  And that's not to speak of Richard Nixon, whose presidency never happened, either. 

Democrats have not forgotten W and often speak of the wars, the deficit, the tax cuts for the rich, and the economy in deep recession, on the brink of a depression, that he bequeathed to the country and to the president who came after.  How ironic that Republicans blame Obama for the last 12 years with nary a mention of George W Bush.  As Democrats say, the election of Romney would take us back to W's policies, but "on steroids". 

THE WALL

A funeral service is held for a woman who just passed away.  As the pallbearers carry the casket out, they accidentally bump into a wall.

They hear a faint moan.  They open the casket and find that the woman is actually alive.

She lives for ten more years and then dies.

They have another funeral for her.  At the end of the service, the pallbearers carry out the casket.

As they are leaving, the husband cries out, "Watch out for that wall!"


Cheers,

Paul (A.)

Odds are the husband was a Republican.

NO ISOLATED INCIDENTS

Rep Todd Akin (R - MO)

Asked why he doesn’t support abortion in most cases of rape, he responded, "From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume maybe that didn't work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist."

Richard Murdock (Candidate for Senate - R- IN)

During last night’s Indiana Senate debate, Republican candidate Richard Mourdock went too far when he said, “…even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Rep Joe Walsh (R - IL)

Abortion bans don’t need exceptions for the life of the mother because of “modern technology and science,” Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said Thursday.

“With modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” of an abortion necessary to save the life of the mother, Walsh said after a debate with Tammy Duckworth, his Democratic opponent....  “… There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing.”

Add Paul Ryan's personhood bill to amend the US Constitution: "To provide that human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization.",  Romney's all-over-the-map-but-he's-against-abortion statements, and anti-women shenanigans and misstatements of biology I have left out, and what you have are not isolated incidents but proposed policies that are part and parcel of the Republican Party.  If you don't believe me, look at their platform, pages 13 and 14.  Republicans, all of you, you own these men and the anti-women policies.  They're yours.  

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

 

The pollsters tell me, as of today, the election is a dead heat, but I'm having real trouble wrapping my head around that piece of information.  The election on November 6 should be a landslide in favor of Obama...a landslide, not because Obama did everything right in the last four years, for I have issues with certain of his policies, but the president did much to better the lives of the citizens of the US. Below is a list of the top-10 accomplishments of the Obama administration from The Washington Monthly.  See details and the rest of the list here.

1. Passed Health Care Reform
 
3. Passed Wall Street Reform

4. Ended the War in Iraq

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry

8. Recapitalized Banks

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

10. Toppled Moammar Gaddafi

I favor certain of Obama's accomplishments over others, but I measure them against what Romney offers the electorate. What are Romney's accomplishments?

1. Signed Romneycare into law as governor of Massachusetts.

2. CEO of Bain & Company, co-founded Bain Capital 

3. CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Romney backed away from Romneycare, then reclaimed the program, then backed away again.  Perhaps there was further waffling that I missed.

Romney accumulated vast wealth during his association with Bain.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move.And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

....

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

....

The only ones who profited in a big way from all the job-killing debt that Romney leveraged were Mitt and his buddies at Bain, along with Wall Street firms like Goldman and Citigroup. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, says the criticisms of Bain about layoffs and meanness miss a more important point, which is that the firm's profit-producing record is absurdly mediocre, especially when set against all the trouble and pain its business model causes. "Bain's fundamental flaw, at least according to the math," Ritholtz writes, "is that they took lots of risk, use immense leverage and charged enormous fees, for performance that was more or less the same as [stock] indexing."

So.  After all the skullduggery, destruction of businesses, and death of jobs, to the great financial benefit of CEOs and top management, Bain produced only a mediocre return for its investors.  Every voter should read the Rolling Stone piece.  It's long but very revealing of the real Mitt Romney, who would trash and pillage the country in a worse way than I ever imagined.  If you thought Gordon Gekko was bad....

QUESTION OF THE DAY

 

Premium binders are on sale at the local office supplies store.  Shall I buy several binders and fill them with premium men?

TODD AKIN PUTS FOOT IN MOUTH AGAIN

“She goes to Washington, D.C., it’s a little bit like one of those dogs, you know ‘fetch.’ She goes to Washington, D.C., and get all of these taxes and red tape and bureaucracy and executive orders and agencies and she brings all of this stuff and dumps it on us in Missouri.”

All right, Claire McCaskill is a Blue Dog Democrat, but Akin takes the analogy way too far.  How can anyone vote for this man?

In case you've forgotten, Akin is the guy who said women do not become pregnant from "legitimate rape".

POTEMKIN VILLAGE

 

Read the entire column.

WENDY LIKES THE BATHTUB

Slurp, slurp, slurp.

So I like to drink water in the bathtub. Do you have a problem with that?

Please do not note the rings around the bathtub.  The post is all about Wendy, who lives with my son and his family. 

REST IN PEACE, GEORGE MCGOVERN

 

Despite a landslide loss to Nixon, McGovern's candidacy and particularly his opposition to the Vietnam War was embraced by the left. McGovern later described the loss as one of the most disheartening points in his life, as South Dakota Public Broadcasting's Charles Michael Rays reports for our Newscast desk.

"I thought the program I spelled out there was the truth," McGovern said. "I thought it was best for America and I'll go to my grave believing America would be better off had I been elected."

As I will go to my grave believing the country would have been better off.  Remember, we voted in Tricky Dick and the Watergate gang again, and despite Kissinger's "Peace is at hand" announcement preceding the election, the war continued until our ignominious departure in 1975.  Nixon was the first and only president in history to resign the office in disgrace.

George McGovern was a brave man, an eloquent man, and a good man. I'm proud to say that I voted for him in 1972.

Isn't the picture splendid?