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YUM YUM

Last Thursday, I extolled the virtues of not eating much.

neodiehl:  “Or you could have a nice glass of wine . . . ”

Drink a glass of red wine (and get some exercise) every day and you’ll live forever.

THE CHOICE

In one minute, in case you haven’t seen it.

MITT: SOLIDLY PRO-CHOICE +AND+ SOLIDLY ANTI-CHOICE

Could he be more unequivocally pro-choice than in this video montage? Well, he was running for governor of Massachusetts, for Pete’s sake. Now he’s solidly anti-choice. There have been quite a few twists and turns along the way — all of them with that faint tone of exasperation he exhibits when anyone questions his sincerity. The thing to note, however, as he explains, is that he has always been strongly pro-life even when he was unequivocally pro-choice.

AS IF YOU NEEDED IT

Here’s a book, 52 Reasons to Vote for Obama.

BOREALIS – ENTRY POINT

There’s been no Borealis news for a while, so the stock has pulled back to around $10.   . . .  For those of us who’ve bought a few shares (or in  my case, a slew), mostly in the $3 to $4 range (though some as high as $16 and one of you at $21), we just sit and wait.  For those who failed to buy and feel you “missed it,” I want to say two things: first, you haven’t; second, you should only buy shares with money you can truly afford to lose (and with a “limit” order, so you don’t accidentally find yourself paying $21).  That second point is, I trust, obvious.  Unlike blue chips like Enron or General Motors or Lehman Brothers where you might have lost most or all your money, Borealis is a speculation where you might lose all or most of your money.  But if WheelTug does get certified and leased to airlines around the world, it is not crazy to imagine that all airplanes will wants this capability, just as all TV’s now come with remote controls . . . at which point, the company could be worth billions of dollars even without allowing for the possibility that the same technology could be useful elsewhere (automobiles?) or that the company’s other technologies, and even its mineral holdings, could have value.  So if you want a lottery ticket where there is a 50% chance, say, that you lose all your money, but a 40% chance you might make a tenfold gain and a 10% chance you make a 100-fold gain, this is, in my view, that ticket.  Knowing that there’s a real chance that, as with any lottery ticket, you will lose your money.

Florida’s former Republican Party chairman, in some hot water himself, charges that the Republican Party systematically attempts to suppress the black vote.  It is also working to suppress the youth vote.

A GOOD QUESTION

What happens if GOP’s voter suppression works?

By Harold Meyerson, Published: July 24 The Washington Post

Suppose Mitt Romney ekes out a victory in November by a margin smaller than the number of young and minority voters who couldn’t cast ballots because the photo-identification laws enacted by Republican governors and legislators kept them from the polls. What should Democrats do then? What would Republicans do? And how would other nations respond?

As suppositions go, this one isn’t actually far-fetched. No one in the Romney camp expects a blowout; if he does prevail, every poll suggests it will be by the skin of his teeth. Numerous states under Republican control have passed strict voter identification laws. Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Georgia require specific kinds of ID; the laws in Michigan, Florida, South Dakota, Idaho and Louisiana are only slightly more flexible. Wisconsin’s law was struck down by a state court.

Instances of voter fraud are almost nonexistent, but the right-wing media’s harping on the issue has given Republican politicians cover to push these laws through statehouse after statehouse. The laws’ intent, however, is entirely political: By creating restrictions that disproportionately impact minorities, they’re supposed to bolster Republican prospects. Ticking off Republican achievements in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, their legislative leader, Mike Turzai, extolled in a talk last month that “voter ID . . . is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

How could Turzai be so sure? The Pennsylvania Department of State acknowledges that as many as 759,000 residents lack the proper ID. That’s 9.2 percent of registered voters, but the figure rises to 18 percent in heavily black Philadelphia. The law also requires that the photo IDs have expiration dates, which many student IDs do not.

The pattern is similar in every state that has enacted these restrictions. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that 8 percent of whites in Texas lack the kind of identification required by that state’s law; the percentage among blacks is three times that. The Justice Department has filed suit against Southern states whose election procedures are covered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It is also investigating Pennsylvania’s law, though that state is not subject to some provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

If voter suppression goes forward and Romney narrowly prevails, consider the consequences. An overwhelmingly and increasingly white Republican Party, based in the South, will owe its power to discrimination against black and Latino voters, much like the old segregationist Dixiecrats. It’s not that Republicans haven’t run voter suppression operations before, but they’ve been under-the-table dirty tricks, such as calling minority voters with misinformation about polling-place locations and hours. By contrast, this year’s suppression would be the intended outcome of laws that Republicans publicly supported, just as the denial of the franchise to Southern blacks before 1965 was the intended result of laws such as poll taxes. More ominous still, by further estranging minority voters, even as minorities constitute a steadily larger share of the electorate, Republicans will be putting themselves in a position where they increasingly rely on only white voters and where their only path to victory will be the continued suppression of minority votes. A cycle more vicious is hard to imagine.

It’s also not a cycle calculated to endear America to the rest of the world. The United States abolished electoral apartheid in the 1960s for reasons that were largely moral but were also geopolitical. Eliminating segregation and race-specific voting helped our case against the Soviets during the Cold War, particularly among the emerging nations of Asia and Africa. It’s not likely that many, anywhere, would favorably view what is essentially a racially based restriction of the franchise. China might well argue that our commitment to democracy is a sham.

And what should Democrats do if Romney comes to power on the strength of racially suppressed votes? Such an outcome and such a presidency, I’d hope they contend, would be illegitimate — a betrayal of our laws and traditions, of our very essence as a democratic republic. Mass demonstrations would be in order. So would a congressional refusal to confirm any of Romney’s appointments. A presidency premised on a racist restriction of the franchise creates a political and constitutional crisis, and responding to it with resigned acceptance or inaction would negate America’s hard-won commitment to democracy and equality.

The course on which Republicans have embarked isn’t politics as usual. We don’t rig elections by race in America, not anymore, and anyone who does should not be rewarded with uncontested power.

BUT WHAT ABOUT FRAUD?

Supposedly, the push for tighter ID and related obstacles is motivated by the need to combat voter fraud.  The truth of course is that it’s awfully difficult to get people who ARE entitled to vote to go out and do so — let alone persuade people to commit a felony to do so.  Mother Jones reports that UFO sightings are more common than voter fraud, there having been “649 million votes cast in general elections between 2000 and 2010, 47,000 UFO sightings, 441 Americans killed by lightning, and 13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation” of the type a photo ID might have prevented.

If we assume that only one in 10,000 cases of actual voter impersonation ever comes to light (which I think is pretty wildly generous to the other side), those 13 actual cases would represent 130,000 fraudulent votes out of 649 million — two-hundredths of one percent.  And note that at least some of that infinitesimal two-hundredths of one percent would cancel itself out, because it’s not realistic to think that 100% of the fraud was committed by Tea Party zealots or by anti-abortion zealots or by God-hates-fags zealots — or by right-wing tricksters of the type who bugged the Watergate or jammed New Hampshire phone lines or are described in here in a book called How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative or here by a veteran Republican Congressional staffer (“the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult”).  No, some of the illegal votes — to the miniscule extent there really are any — would surely come be cast by misguided zealots on the left.  The two would at least partially cancel each other out.  Which takes miniscule to down to someplace between infinitesimal and zero.

So give me a break.  Call a spade a spade.  The Republican governors and state legislators who’ve enacted these laws don’t want poor people and black people and students voting, because they vote for Democrats.  It’s as simple — and anti-American — as that.

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I was so taken by these by-now famous three minutes of the new HBO drama “The Newsroom” that I plugged the show in this space a few weeks back.

So the first thing to say is: if you haven’t yet seen those three minutes — in which one of the nation’s best-known nightly news anchors (think an exasperated Tom Brokaw, if he still occupied one of the anchor chairs) cracks during a panel discussion (he’s apparently on meds) and does some very serious “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”-style truth telling — do.

The whole country should see those three minutes, except for the F-word (sorry about that) and even though a lot of us, including me, believe America is still, in fundamentally important respects, the greatest country on Earth.  But one of those respects is that we produce three-minute clips like this one, and have — or I hope still have — the capacity to discuss them and, eventually, stumble to the right conclusion and self-correct.

That whole first pilot episode was, I thought, pretty spectacular.  The newsroom encounters the BP Deepwater Horizon blow-out.  If you liked Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” — I totally loved it — here he is writing “The Newsroom.”

Only . . . when I started watching a subsequent episode, it seemed to me the dialog was just a bit TOO snappy, the interpersonal relations just a bit TOO intense — are all these people on coke? — and the story line just a bit TOO preachy.  Which is a shame, because we need this message to get out.  Maybe Sorkin has dialed it back a bit, even at the expense of its incandescence.  (As one of my friends put it: “Don’t any of these characters ever say anything humdrum and boring?  And slowly?  Everyday normal-speak things like, ‘I don’t know.  Where do YOU want to eat?'”)  I do plan to give it another shot.

In the meantime, I have fallen in love with “Political Animals,” in which Sigourney Weaver plays a thinly disguised Hilary Clinton, and the actor who plays her husband delivers a grossly unfair yet vastly entertaining caricature (which is okay, because it’s fiction) and they have handsome twin sons and . . . just watch.  You’ll love it.  You can see it on-line at that link.

RIDE, SALLY

Russell Bell: “From the New York Times obituary of Sally Ride we learn that ‘Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy’ — a woman.  My gaydar failed again: Anderson Cooper, Ken Mehlman, Ellen DeGeneres . . .  Perhaps it never worked.  At least there was progress at the Albuquerque Journal: they didn’t remove mention of Dr O’Shaughnessy from the wire service obit they ran as they removed the mention of you from Mr Nolan’s.”

Sally was a hero (if you ask me), and young people, especially, should know that heroes come in all stripes.

I don’t eat much.  Saves time, saves money, saves the planet*; good for your looks, good for your health — and makes everything you do eat taste better.

This is such a simple yet life-changing, life-extending win-win-win-win-win-win I think I’ll leave it at that.

Just sayin’.

*A lot of water and oil and coal and pesticide and packaging go into getting that slice of pizza into your stomach; more still if it’s pepperoni.

The main reason not to vote for Mr. Romney in my view is the global depression that would result from the Republican austerity vision to which he and the House Republicans are so deeply committed.  They would out-Hoover Hoover at exactly the time we should be investing to rebuild our infrastructure — both because it’s crumbling and because that would jump start the economy — and at exactly the time we should be investing to make our nation energy efficient — both because there is a tremendous pay-off to be had in that (in energy savings and in national security and in confronting the climate crisis) and because, again, that, too, would jump start the economy.

So that’s the main reason.  One way lies depression; the other, even with continued Republican obstructionism, too-slow-but-steady forward motion (which, if the Republicans start cooperating even a little bit, as after the election they might, could speed up considerably).

But there are other reasons.  The Supreme Court.  Do we really want the Court tilted even further right for the next 20 years?  The Court that gave us Citizens United, allowing billionaires and corporations to spend unlimited sums to buy elections?  And just threaten to spend unlimited amounts intimidate legislators into blocking anything they don’t like?  All, or mostly, in secret?  Without even having to disclose their involvement?  Really?  This is democracy as the founders envisioned it?

And then there are the more subjective reasons.  MittGetsWorse (a play on the “It Gets Better” campaign)  features brief video testimonies, the first of which — Julie Goodrich’s — tells the story of her meeting with then Governor Romney.  “I have never before in my life stood before someone who had no capacity for empathy” — or even an interest in faking it, apparently.  It’s a compelling four-minute video.  Even if you oppose marriage equality, as nearly half of all Americans still do, I’d bet the story of Julie, Annie, and their 8-year-old daughter will strike you differently from the way it struck Mitt Romney.