• Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: December 21, 2011

    December 21, 2011 /

    These are my links for December 21st from 08:15 to 13:30:

    • Perry Super PAC Smashes Mitt, Newt in New Ad – Texas-topper-backing “Make Us Great Again” buys IA and SC TV time for new 30-second spot dumping the oppo file on the two frontrunners.

      Announcer: “Decades ago Gingrich goes to Washington. Romney runs pro-choice campaign for Senate.”

      Read the script below.

      SCRIPT: Decades ago Gingrich goes to Washington. Romney runs pro-choice campaign for Senate. Gingrich found guilty of ethics violations. Mitt creates Romneycare. Gingrich joins Pelosi in support of global warming. Support TARP bank bailout. Collects big bucks from Freddie Mac. Rick Perry creates a million new jobs, cuts taxes, reduces regulations; the proven conservative.

    • Make a deal on the payroll tax, and come back for more – The Journal editors suggest: “At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.”

      Johnson is suggesting implementing seven of the spending-cut ideas from the Simpson-Bowles debt commission, which amount to a cut of $655 billion over 10 years. These are relatively noncontroversial items such as reducing congressional and White House budgets by 15 percent, imposing a three-year freeze on federal workers’ pay, reducing the size of the federal workforce and selling excess government real estate. In other words, Johnson is asking if his colleagues can’t at the very least agree to chop the low-hanging fruit in the budget.

      Well, it would have been nice if the supercommittee could have managed that, or if that kind of package of cuts could have been presented as a full year offset for the payroll tax reduction. But that’s for next year.

      The GOP, if it has not the wherewithal to oppose a payroll tax reduction (When will Congress ever have the nerve to increase it and stem further hemorrhaging of funds available for Social Security? Why not cut the entire tax, according to the Democrats’ logic?), then cut a deal and come back to finish the work in 2012. If the Democrats want another 10 months of payroll tax relief, then Republicans should get something for that (e.g. more cuts, a definitive decision on the pipeline). Just not now. In January.

    • Capitol Stand-off: Republicans Caving? – My prediction: House Republicans will soon – probably within 24 hours – cave in and accept the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut passed last week by the Senate.
      I base this on conversations with House Republicans who know they are losing the public relations battle and losing it badly. They know they are taking the blame for a stand-off that threatens to raise taxes on 160 million Americans. And they cannot let that happen.
      As one top House Republican aide just told me: “I do not expect taxes to go up on January 1st.”
      At this point, there is really only one way for taxes not to go up on January 1st: House Republicans need to fold. Democrats won’t give in because they are completely confident that House Republicans will take the blame for the impasse. And Republicans don’t disagree.
      Republicans are now searching for a face-saving way to give up. The most likely scenario would be for Democrats to agree to negotiations on a full-year extension to begin as soon as next week – but only after the House passes the two-month extension.
    • (404) http://t.co/tVY9GezF%E2%80%9D – I think that is HIGH “@RasmussenPoll: 22% Say U.S. Heading In Right Direction…
    • House GOP hearing it from all sides over payroll tax cut – That sound you hear in Washington is … silence.

      The Senate is gone. The House has left behind a few stragglers to sit on a conference committee that may never meet. The president’s still around but itching to go to Hawaii to be with his family. Christmas is coming. Hanukkah is here.

      The decision by House Republicans to deep-six a bipartisan deal to extend a payroll tax cut has left that party divided and given Democrats an issue with which to hammer them throughout the holidays. House leaders insist theirs is the principled stand because they want a year-long extension, not a two-month one.

      But right now, they are hearing it from all sides, including the influential Wall Street Journal editorial board, no friend to Democrats.

    • Texas Gains the Most in Population Since the Census – Texas gained more people than any other state between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2011 (529,000), followed by California (438,000), Florida (256,000), Georgia (128,000) and North Carolina (121,000), according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates for states and Puerto Rico. Combined, these five states accounted for slightly more than half the nation’s total population growth.

          “These are the first set of Census Bureau population estimates to be published since the official 2010 Census state population counts were released a year ago,” said Census Bureau Director Robert Groves. “Our nation is constantly changing and these estimates provide us with our first measure of how much each state has grown or declined in total population since Census Day 2010.”

           The United States as a whole saw its population increase by 2.8 million over the 15-month period, to 311.6 million. Its growth of 0.92 percent between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2011, was the lowest since the mid-1940s.

          “The nation’s overall growth rate is now at its lowest point since before the baby boom,” Groves said.

          California remained the most populous state, with a July 1, 2011, population of 37.7 million. Rounding out the top five states were Texas (25.7 million), New York (19.5 million), Florida (19.1 million) and Illinois (12.9 million).

    • Gingrich to House GOP: Give In on Payroll Tax – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who famously lost budget battles to President Bill Clinton amid two government shutdowns, had some advice to House Republicans at loggerheads with another Democratic president: Give in.

      “Incumbent presidents have enormous advantages. And I think what Republicans ought to do is what’s right for America. They ought to do it calmly and pleasantly and happily,” Mr. Gingrich said when asked about the clash between President Barack Obama and House Republicans over extension of the payroll tax cut.

      Mr. Gingrich made it clear he favored a one-year extension of the two-percentage point payroll tax cut, which expires Jan. 1, not the two-month extension that passed the Senate with bipartisan support. He called the Senate bill “an absurd dereliction of duty.”

      “Obama is so inept as a president, and the Congress is so dysfunctional as an institution, that we are lurching from failure to failure to failure,” Mr. Gingrich said.

      He offered sympathy to House Speaker John Boehner for having to negotiate with “a Senate majority leader who is totally disruptive and a president who is basically campaigner-in-chief, who has no interest in solving the problems of the American people.”

      But he said resistance was doomed.

      “It’s very hard for the legislative branch to outperform the president in communications,” he said. “He has all the advantages of being one person. He has all the advantages of the White House as a backdrop, and my experience is presidents routinely win.”

    • Who is a Ron Paul supporter? – Ron Paul supporters are certainly their own breed.

      Despite the candidate’s success in expanding his political brand in recent weeks and months, those who support him remain a very distinct segment of the Republican electorate, as evidenced by a new poll in Iowa.

      The Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG survey is the latest poll to show Paul leading in the Hawkeye State’s caucuses. His 27.5 percent-to-25.3 percent lead on Newt Gingrich is within the margin of error, but it reflects a race that appears to be headed in the good doctor’s direction.

    • News from The Associated Press – OUCH “@AP: France ponders drastic move: telling 30,000 women to remove risky breast implants: -CC”
    • TechCrunch – Google+ – Scribd protests SOPA by making a billion pages on the web… – Scribd protests SOPA by making a billion pages on the web disappear.TechCrunch | Scribd Protests SOP
    • Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear – The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.

      To highlight the chilling effect this legislation could have on free speech on te Internet, today document-sharing site Scribd is protesting SOPA by making every document disappear word-by-word when you vist the site. All in all, there are a billion pages of documents on the Scribd. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web,” warns Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder, Scribd.

    • (404) http://t.co/ugw0J0k5%E2%80%9D – Why, of course he does…“@thehill: Obama calls Boehner, urges him to allow vote on Senate payroll bill
    • GOP shuts down House on Dems’ payroll-tax gambit – House Democrats tried Wednesday to force a vote on the Senate’s two-month extension of the payroll-tax cut, but Republicans gaveled the House closed to prevent them from having a chance, as top GOP leaders huddled down the hall to try to figure a way out of the mess.

      The House was set to hold a pro forma session, but two top Democrats, Reps. Steny H. Hoyer and Chris Van Hollen, demanded to be recognized to try to force a vote on the two-month extension. House Republicans have blocked that deal, which is strongly backed by President Obama, and are holding out for an extension that covers all of 2012.

      Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who was serving as the presiding officer, banged his gavel to close the session Wednesday morning even as the two Democrats were demanding to be recognized.

      “You’re walking out, you’re walking away, just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle-class taxpayers,,” Mr. Hoyer shouted after Mr. Fitzpatrick as he marched off the floor, leaving the two Democrats, both from Maryland, to themselves in the cavernous chamber.

    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: December 21, 2011 – The Morning Drill: December 21, 2011
    • The Morning Flap: December 21, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Morning Flap: December 21, 2011
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: December 7, 2011

    December 7, 2011 /

    These are my links for December 6th through December 7th:

    • Alec Baldwin: A Farewell to Common Sense, Style, and Service on American Airlines – First off, I would like to apologize to the other passengers onboard the American Airlines flight that I was thrown off of yesterday. It was never my intention to inconvenience anyone with my “issue” with a certain flight attendant.

      I suppose a part of my frustration lay with the fact that I had flown American for over 20 years and was brand loyal, in the extreme. The ticketing agents and Admiral’s Club staff have always been nothing but abundantly helpful to me, as I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles with the one carrier.

      My confusion began when the flight, already a half hour behind schedule, boarded, the door closed, and we proceeded to sit at the gate for another fifteen minutes. I then did what I have nearly always done and that was to pull out my phone to complete any other messaging I had to do before take off. In nearly all other instances, the flight attendants seemed to be unbothered by and said nothing about such activity, by me or anyone else, until we actually were pulling away from the gate.

    • Sarah Palin Won’t Endorse Before Iowa Caucuses – Sarah Palin told Fox Business Network today that she will not be endorsing a candidate in the next few weeks.

      “Not before Iowa,” Palin said, in an interview set to air at 10 p.m. EST on FBN. “And Iowa’s not the end of the road. It’s the beginning of the road really. Newt Gingrich, I believe, has risen in the polls because he has been a bit more successful than Romney in reaching out to that base of constitutional conservatives who are part of the tea party movement. He hasn’t been afraid of that movement. He has been engaged in that movement most recently in order for them to hear his solutions and there’s been some forgiveness then on the part of Tea Party Patriots for some of the things in Gingrich’s past.”

    • Obama administration refuses to relax Plan B restrictions – The federal government Wednesday rejected a request to let young teenage girls buy the controversial morning-after pill Plan B directly off drugstore and supermarket shelves without a prescription.

      In a rare public split among federal health officials, the Health and Human Services Department overruled a decision by the Food and Drug Administration to make the drug available to anyone of any age without a restriction.

      In a statement, FDA Administrator Margaret A. Hamburg said she had decided the medication could be used safely by girls and women of all ages. But she added that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had rejected the move.

      “I agree … there is adequate and reasonable, well-supported, and science-based evidence that Plan B One-Step is safe and effective and should be approved for nonprescription use for all females of child-bearing potential,” Hamburg said.

      “However, this morning I received a memorandum from the Secretary of Health and Human Services invoking her authority under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to execute its provisions and stating that she does not agree with the Agency’s decision to allow the marketing of Plan B One-Step nonprescription for all females of child-bearing potential,” she said.

    • Death penalty dropped against Mumia Abu-Jamal – Prosecutors on Wednesday abandoned their 30-year pursuit of the execution of convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther whose claim that he was the victim of a racist legal system made him an international cause celebre.

      Abu-Jamal, 58, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison. His writings and radio broadcasts from death row had put him at the center of an international debate over capital punishment.

      Flanked by Officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced his decision two days short of the 30th anniversary of the white policeman’s killing.

      He said continuing to seek the death penalty could lead to “an unknowable number of years” of appeals, and that some witnesses have died or are unavailable after nearly three decades.

      “There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982,” said Williams, the city’s first black district attorney. “While Abu-Jamal will no longer be facing the death penalty, he will remain behind bars for the rest of his life, and that is where he belongs.”

      Abu-Jamal was originally sentenced to death. His murder conviction was upheld through years of appeals. But in 2008, a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing on the grounds that the instructions given to the jury were potentially misleading.

      After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in two months ago, prosecutors were forced to decide whether to pursue the death penalty again or accept a life sentence without parole.

      Williams said he reached the decision with the blessing of Faulkner’s widow, Maureen.

    • Poll Watch: A Majority of California Voters Favor Governor Jerry Brown’s Pension Reform Plans » Flap’s California Blog – Poll Watch: A Majority of California Voters Favor Governor Jerry Brown’s Pension Reform Plans
    • Anti-union “paycheck protection” measure qualifies for Nov. 2012 ballot | Politics Blog | an SFGate.com blog – Anti-union “paycheck protection” measure qualifies for Nov. 2012 California ballot #catcot
    • President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Newt Gingrich Leads BIG in 3 Early States – Is Newt the Nominee? | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Newt Gingrich Leads BIG in 3 Early States – Is Newt the Nominee? #tcot #catcot
    • Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire – RT @pwire: New polls from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida will be out within the hour…
    • O’Grady v. Superior Court – 139 Cal. App. 4th 1423, 2006 WL 1452685 (Cal. App. , 6th Dist., May 26, 2006) – Apple Barred From Obtaining Source Of Blog’s Article

      Reversing the court below, the California Court of Appeals holds that the Stored Communications Act prohibits an ISP that hosted a blog’s email account from disclosing e-mails sent to the blog in response to a subpoena issued in a civil litigation.  The subpoena sought production of e-mails that would permit Apple Computer (“Apple”) to identify the individual(s) who transmitted trade secret information about an as yet unreleased Apple product to the blog/website Power Page, which information was the source of articles Power Page subsequently published on its blog/website.

      The Court further held that petitioners, who acted as publishers of, and/or editors or reporters for, the news blogs that published the stories at issue about this Apple product, were entitled to a protective order against their disclosure of the confidential sources of their stories.  Notwithstanding Apple’s claim that the information petitioners received from these services constituted trade secrets disclosed in violation of confidentiality agreements each of its employees had signed, the Court held such disclosure barred by both California’s Reporter’s Shield Law and the First Amendment.  The Court held that the Shield Law, which prohibits a court from holding in contempt a publisher, editor or reporter of “a newspaper, magazines or other periodical publication” for failing to disclose the source of a published story, protected petitioners, publishers and/or reporters of news blogs, from having to disclose the sources of the stories at issue.  The First Amendment similarly provided protection, given Apple’s failure to fully exhaust other avenues of disclosure before pursuing discovery from petitioners.

    • Crystal Cox, Oregon Blogger, Isn’t a Journalist, Concludes U.S. Court–Imposes $2.5 Million Judgement on Her – A U.S. District Court judge in Portland has drawn a line in the sand between “journalist” and “blogger.” And for Crystal Cox, a woman on the latter end of that comparison, the distinction has cost her $2.5 million.
      Speaking to Seattle Weekly, Cox says that the judgement could have impacts on bloggers everywhere.

       

      “This should matter to everyone who writes on the Internet,” she says.

      Cox runs several law-centric blogs, like industrywhistleblower.com, judicialhellhole.com, and obsidianfinancesucks.com, and was sued by investment firm Obsidian Finance Group in January for defamation, to the tune of $10 million, for writing several blog posts that were highly critical of the firm and its co-founder Kevin Padrick.

      Representing herself in court, Cox had argued that her writing was a mixture of facts, commentary and opinion (like a million other blogs on the web) and moved to have the case dismissed. Dismissed it wasn’t, however, and after throwing out all but one of the blog posts cited by Obsidian Financial, the judge ruled that this single post was indeed defamatory because it was presented, essentially, as more factual in tone than her other posts, and therefore a reasonable person could conclude it was factual.

      The judge ruled against Cox on that post and awarded $2.5 million to the investment firm.

    • Unlike Oregon, Bloggers Are Journalists in Washington State, Do Qualify for Legal Protections – This morning we told you about the troubling case of Crystal Cox, the Oregon blogger who was successfully sued for defamation, thanks in part to a federal court ruling that she isn’t a “journalist” and therefore doesn’t qualify for the state’s media shield laws. Now, the man who wrote the shield laws in Washington state has weighed in on whether such a ruling would fly here.
      Bruce E. H. Johnson, attorney with Davis Wright Tremaine, is a veteran litigator in the field of free speech and media law. In 2006 he drafted Washington state’s media shield legislation, and in 2007 the state legislature passed it into law.

       

      He says that had Cox’s case been heard in a Washington court, the outcome (at least in regards to the shield law) would have most likely been different.

      “I believe the shield law would have been applied [in Washington state],” Johnson tells Seattle Weekly. “Oregon’s law was probably written before blogging was accounted for

    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: December 7, 2011 – The Morning Drill: December 7, 2011
    • President 2012: Newt Gingrich the Worst of Both Worlds? | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: Newt Gingrich the Worst of Both Worlds? #tcot #catcot
    • Blagojevich gets 14 years in prison for corruption – CNN Political Ticker – CNN.com Blogs – RT @PoliticalTicker: BREAKING: Blagojevich sentenced to 14 years in prison –
    • Dilbert December 7, 2011 – Lower the Expectations? » Flap’s California Blog – Dilbert December 7, 2011 – Lower the Expectations?
    • Day By Day December 7, 2011 – In Your Face Politics | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Day By Day December 7, 2011 – In Your Face Politics #tcot #catcot
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-07 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-07 #tcot #catcot
    • Getting to a Brokered Convention | RedState – RT @fivethirtyeight: Some Republican donors still trying to draft new candidate.
    • No TR: The Limits of Obama’s Bully Pulpit – 2012 Decoded – Sorry but Prez Obama is NO Teddy Roosevelt – not even close –
    • Flap’s California Afternoon Collection: December 6, 2011 » Flap’s California Blog – Flap’s California Afternoon Collection: December 6, 2011
    • (500) http://flapsblog.com/2011/12/06/the-afternoon-flap-december-6-2011/ – The Afternoon Flap: December 6, 2011 #tcot #catcot
    • Heartbreak Awaits Republicans Who Love Gingrich: Ramesh Ponnuru- Bloomberg – Heartbreak Awaits Republicans Who Love Gingrich
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: December 6, 2011

    December 6, 2011 /

    These are my links for December 1st through December 6th:

    • Senate Republican filibuster blocks Obama D.C. Circuit nominee Caitlin Halligan – Tuesday’s vote is notable in that it marks the second time that Senate Republicans have blocked an Obama judicial nominee. In May, Republicans filibustered Obama’s nomination of Goodwin Liu to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit following a protracted battle over what GOP senators cited as the University of California at Berkeley law professor’s liberal views.

      Six years ago, a bipartisan “Gang of 14” senators negotiated an agreement aimed at preventing filibusters of judicial nominees except under what they termed “extraordinary circumstances.” On Tuesday, as in May’s vote on Liu, the four Republican members of that group who remain in the Senate – Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) – voted “no,” a sign that Republicans as well as Democrats have now come to view filibusters of judicial nominations as fair game.

    • Glenn Beck the latest GOPer to take on Gingrich – Conservative radio host Glenn Beck became the latest Republican to go after newly minted presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich Tuesday.

      After saying the radio segment would not be a “gotcha interview,” Beck aggressively questioned the former House speaker over issues including climate change and health care reform.

      Gingrich somewhat famously recorded a public service announcement in 2008 with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about steps to combat climate change, something Beck in the interview called “the dumbest moment.” In response, Gingrich toed the line on the issue, saying he believed “in the environment in general,” and that evidence exists on both sides of the climate change argument.

      “I never believed in Al Gore’s fantasies,” Gingrich said, before adding that he worked against cap and trade legislation as a member of Congress.

      Criticism of his long record in public office has increased with his recent rise in polling of Republican voters, something Beck perpetuated during his questioning over Gingrich’s stance on health care, and more specifically the changes to Medicare he would or would not support.

      Gingrich said he promotes a practical approach to changing the program, instead of completely overhauling or dismantling it, as some, including House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan and Beck have suggested.

      “I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options, not one where you suddenly impose upon,” Gingrich said. “I’m against ‘ObamaCare,’ which is imposing radical change and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.”

    • Heartbreak Awaits Republicans Who Love Gingrich – Before Republicans put Newt Gingrich at the top of their party, they should consider what happened the last time he led it.
      In the mid-1990s, Gingrich was the de facto head of the Republican Party. He helped lead it to victory in the congressional elections of 1994, which brought about real accomplishments such as welfare reform. But once he attained power, both his popularity and that of his party started to plummet. In the aftermath of his leadership, a Republican was able to take the presidency only by pointedly distancing himself from Gingrich.
      Conservatives who dislike George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism have Gingrich to thank for it. After Gingrich lost the budget battles with President Bill Clinton, it took 15 years for any politician to take up the cause of limited-government conservatism that he had discredited.
      Although Gingrich isn’t solely responsible for the Republican policy defeats of those years, his erratic behavior, lack of discipline and self-absorption had a lot to do with them. He explained that one reason the federal government shut down in 1995 was that he was angry that Clinton had snubbed him during an international flight. The Clinton White House then released pictures of the two men gabbing on the plane. Later negotiations didn’t go well, with Gingrich saying, “I melt when I’m around him.”
    • Poll Shows Age Gap in G.O.P. on Immigration – With immigration now a front-burner issue in the Republican presidential contest, a new poll shows a substantial age gap among Republican voters over whether there should be a path to citizenship for immigrants who are in the country illegally.

      A majority – 57 percent — of Republicans who are 65 and older say that tighter border security and tough law enforcement should be the only focus of immigration policy, with no path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan group in Washington. Only about one-quarter of this group, or 24 percent, favor combining strict enforcement with a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

      Among Republicans who are younger than 30, the poll found, 42 percent favor a combined approach of tough enforcement against illegal immigration with a path to citizenship, while 30 percent wanted only enforcement. Among these younger Republicans, another 26 percent said that opening a path to citizenship should be the immigration priority, with or without tougher enforcement.

      The poll showed other differences. Among Republican voters who agreed with the Tea Party, 52 percent favored a policy based only on tougher enforcement. Among Republicans who disagreed with the Tea Party or had no opinion, 36 percent wanted only enforcement, while 44 percent favored policies pairing enforcement with a path to citizenship.

    • (500) http://flapsblog.com/2011/12/06/president-2012-gop-poll-watch-gingrich-37-vs-romney-22-vs-paul-8-vs-perry-7/ – President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Gingrich 37% Vs. Romney 22% Vs. Paul 8% Vs. Perry 7% #tcot #catcot
    • Bachmann: Newt Gingrich is a frugal socialist – Responding to Newt’s justification of his support of the Prescription Drug entitlement that was passed under the Bush administration, Bachmann said:

      It doesn’t help to have a frugal socialist. That’s really what we’re talking about is managing socialism and trying to be a frugal socialist.

      Beck, recognizing that a headline had just been made sought to clarify, asking Bachmann “Did you just say that Newt Gingrich is a socialist?” Bachmann responded:

      What I’m saying is that – I’m saying a frugal socialist, yes! Because you’re looking at proposals and programs that are in effect redistribution of wealth and socialism-based, and are we going to have real change in the country or are we going to have frugal socialists?

    • Why Newt Gingrich is an easy target—John Podhoretz – One of the pithiest quotes in American history may also be the dumbest: “There are no second acts in American lives.”

      F. Scott Fitzgerald said it and promptly died before he could have a second act — but he would have had one, because that’s what tends to happen to famous and accomplished people in the United States. It’s happening to Newt Gingrich right now.

      For those of us who live and breathe politics and make our livings in and around it, the words “Newt Gingrich” mean something entirely different than they do to the Republican primary voters who are now shifting over to him in droves.

    • President 2012 GOP Iowa Poll Watch: Gingrich Leading in Yet Another Poll | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – RE: Good question. But, Gingrich’s baggage has been around for a long time.
    • Dilbert December 4, 2011 – Carpool Poser » Flap’s California Blog – Dilbert December 4, 2011 – Carpool Poser
    • President 2012 GOP Iowa Poll Watch: Gingrich Leading in Yet Another Poll | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 GOP Iowa Poll Watch: Gingrich Leading in Yet Another Poll #tcot #catcot
    • Osteoporosis drugs helped astronauts, scientists say – Researchers have confirmed that five astronauts who stayed long term at the International Space Station were able to prevent bone-density loss by taking osteoporosis drugs.

      Astronauts in a weightless environment usually lose 5 to 7 percent of their bone density in six months even while exercising two hours a day. In the study conducted by researchers of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Tokushima University and others, five astronauts who stayed in space for up to 163 days exercised daily and took bisphosphonates used to treat osteoporosis once a week during their stay on the space station. As a result, researchers found almost no bone-density loss in the astronauts.

    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: December 6, 2011 – The Morning Drill: December 6, 2011
    • Day By Day December 6, 2011 – Proud | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Day By Day December 6, 2011 – Proud #tcot #catcot
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-06 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-06 #tcot #catcot
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Starbucks – On the way home from Vegas (@ Starbucks)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Cancun Resort – Soon will leave Las Vegas to return home in Thousand Oaks (@ Cancun Resort)
    • foursquare :: Cancun Resort :: Las Vegas, NV – I just ousted Ryry as the mayor of Cancun Resort on @foursquare!
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-05 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-05 #tcot #catcot
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Cancun Resort – Up, Starbucks completed & ready for Las Vegas Half Marathon. #rnrlv #stripatnight (@ Cancun Resort)
    • First Read – Gingrich takes control in Iowa – RT @ZekeJMiller: NBC Marist poll in NH: Romney 29, Gingrch 23, Paul 16, Huntsman 9.
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-04 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-04 #tcot #catcot
    • The Cain Solutions – RT @katieharbath: now up
    • The Cain Solutions – RT @katieharbath: now up
    • (500) http://www.hermancain.com/livestream – RT @THEHermanCain Team HC: Livestream coverage of Mr. Cain’s announcement begins at 1:00 pm ET. #tcot
    • Barbour Says Perry Still Has a Chance – Barbour Says Perry Still Has a Chance
    • Romney and Gingrich, from bad to worse – Republicans are more conservative than at any time since their 1980 dismay about another floundering president. They are more ideologically homogenous than ever in 156 years of competing for the presidency. They anticipated choosing between Mitt Romney, a conservative of convenience, and a conviction politician to his right. The choice, however, could be between Romney and the least conservative candidate, Newt Gingrich.

      Romney’s main objection to contemporary Washington seems to be that he is not administering it. God has 10 commandments, Woodrow Wilson had 14 points, Heinz had 57 varieties, but Romney’s economic platform has 59 planks — 56 more than necessary if you have low taxes, free trade and fewer regulatory burdens. Still, his conservatism-as-managerialism would be a marked improvement upon today’s bewildered liberalism.

    • Barbour Says Perry Still Has a Chance – Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) tells the New York Times that it’s not clear Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee.

      Said Barbour: “I don’t think it’s clear. I think people make the mistake of writing off Rick Perry and believe he can’t come back. He’s got a mountain to get over, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Both Newt and Romney have a lot of support, but I don’t think it’s a two-man race. I think Perry could get back in it with Gingrich and Romney. I can’t look you in the eye and say nobody else can come up. You’ve got to learn your lesson this year not to say that about anybody.”

      He added: “I haven’t decided who is the best nominee for the party. I can see how either one of them could be the best nominee. But I think it is premature to write off Perry. He is a very successful governor. This is very unpredictable. I’ve never seen a nomination on our side like this.”

    • Mitt Romney looks to outlast and outwork Gingrich to GOP nomination – The Romney campaign believes organization will be particularly critical because of changes in the nominating process. In the past, the winner of a state — or, in some cases, the top vote-getter in each congressional district — won all the delegates. But in 2012, most of the 30 states that hold contests before April 1 will award delegates proportionally. The ones that will come after will still be winner-takes-all.

      That means a candidate could lose a number of states but still remain competitive in the race to gain the majority of the 2,427 delegates at stake.

      As a reminder to take the long view, Romney’s political director, Rich Beeson, walks around headquarters carrying a matrix in his pocket charting which states award delegates proportionally and which are winner-takes-all.

      “We’re not Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Beeson said. “We don’t have the luxury to just do one thing and do it right.”

    • Day By Day December 3, 2011 – Weaning | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Day By Day December 3, 2011 – Weaning #tcot #catcot
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Cancun Resort – Drinking Starbucks with Alice listening to the Las Vegas wind. (@ Cancun Resort)
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-03 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-03 #tcot #catcot
    • yfrog Photo : http://yfrog.com/ntl8kej Shared by Flap – At Las Vegas Rock and Roll Expo
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Sands Convention Center – Rock and Roll Expo is very big and full of runners #rnrlv (@ Sands Convention Center w/ 21 others)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Sands Expo Convention Center Hall B – At the Rock and Roll Expo #rnrlv (@ Sands Expo Convention Center Hall B)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap’s Badges :: Overshare – I just unlocked the “Overshare” badge on @foursquare!
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ The Palazzo Resort Hotel & Casino – Almost at the Rock and Roll Expo #rnrlv (@ The Palazzo Resort Hotel & Casino w/ 5 others)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Mandalay Bay Casino – Where the half marathon will start on Sunday night #rnrlv (@ Mandalay Bay Casino)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ M Resort Spa Casino – We have arrived in Vegas. Heading to Rock n Roll Expo #rnrlv (@ M Resort Spa Casino w/ 2 others)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ I See Vegas!! – I see it (@ I See Vegas!!)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Almost Vegas Baby! – Almost…. (@ Almost Vegas Baby!)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap’s Badges :: Mall Rat – I just unlocked the “Mall Rat” badge on @foursquare! Time for a fancy pretzel.
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Primm Fashion Outlet – On our way to Las Vegas Rock n Roll Expo #rnrlv (@ Primm Fashion Outlet)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Baker, CA – Civilization? (@ Baker, CA)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Zzyzzx, Solve For Z – On the road to Vegas (@ Zzyzzx, Solve For Z)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Starbucks – On the way to Vegas with Tara and Alice (@ Starbucks)
    • President 2012: The Question – Mitt or Newt? | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: The Question – Mitt or Newt? #tcot #catcot
    • U.S. Unemployment Rate Falls to 8.6 % From 9% – But…. | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – U.S. Unemployment Rate Falls to 8.6 % From 9% – But…. #tcot #catcot
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-02 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-02 #tcot #catcot
    • Unauthorized Immigrants: Length of Residency, Patterns of Parenthood – Nearly two-thirds of the 10.2 million unauthorized adult immigrants in the United States have lived in this country for at least 10 years and nearly half are parents of minor children, according to new estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

      These estimates are based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2010 Current Population Survey, augmented with the Center’s analysis of the demographic characteristics of the unauthorized immigrant population using a “residual estimation methodology”1 that the Center has employed for many years.

    • Leno Ad
      – YouTube       – I like this ad from Rick Perry Can Perry make a come back, if Newt heads downward in the polls?
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: December 1, 2011

    December 1, 2011 /

    These are my links for November 30th through December 1st:

    • Obama vs. Boeing: The War’s Not Over – I wish I could be as happy as James is about the resolution of this Boeing fiasco, but I’m not — not by a long shot. It is infuriating to see the impunity with which the Obama administration persecutes private businesses even when it knows that its actions are probably illegal and stand a good chance of being tossed out of court. And the problem is systemic; in fact, we should thank the Obama administration for demonstrating just how little protection private businesses have from the abuses of the federal government under current law.

      NLRB’s move against Boeing was among the clearest examples yet — a demonstrably illegal action justified to the media with demonstrable falsehoods. Boeing was not transferring production of Dreamliners from pro-union Washington State to right-to-work South Carolina, as NLRB claimed: It was expanding production of Dreamliners in both locations because of soaring demand. And it was the administration, not Boeing, that gave the impression that Boeing was punishing its unions in Washington for previous strikes. The outrage is in the details: Please read Boeing’s letter of complaint to NLRB from back in May. Boeing CEO Jim McNerney’s subsequent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was a classic of politeness and restraint, given the NLRB action.

      Under the terms of the agreement Boeing reached with its union this week, the company will be allowed to build additional Dreamliners at its new South Carolina plant, so long as it builds future 737 MAX planes in Washington. I can understand why reasonable people are happy about that, but it’s hard to believe that the federal government even had the power to prevent Boeing from opening its new plant there in the first place.

    • National GOP Poll: Gingrich 38% Romney 17% – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has surged to the largest national lead held by any candidate so far in the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination.

      A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters finds Gingrich on top with 38% of the vote. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a distant second at 17%. No other candidate reaches double-digits

    • Harkin: Gingrich as GOP nominee would be “heaven sent” (audio) – U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) held a telephone conference call with reporters this morning.  The topic of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was raised, and Harkin started swinging (rhetorically).  Here’s the AUDIO.
      “I was in the House with Newt, as a matter of fact, years ago. I can remember him being a bomb thrower at that time. One of those people always lobbing things around. I thought at that time, in his early career in the House, he was irresponsible at that time. I kind of got to know Newt later on, (he’s an) intriguing individual, but perhaps I’ve never met a more undisciplined person in politics in my life and if you’re going to run for president, you have to have discipline. Believe me, I speak from experience on that one and if you’re going to be president you have to have some discipline in how you approach things and how you assess situations.  Newt has never been one to engage mind before opening mouth. He engages mouth before engaging his mind sometimes, most of the time. That doesn’t bode well for him at all. I think there’s some, what I’m picking up around here is there’s a lot of quiet, silent cheering in the Obama Administration and the Obama campaign for Newt to get the nomination. It would be just be heaven-sent if he got the nomination.”
      “…Someone once described the prospect of Newt getting the nomination, saying that, ‘Imagine that you’re standing in front of a door and behind that door all these suitcases are piled and you open the door and all the suitcases come tumbling out.’  Of course, I didn’t know what they were talking about. He said, ‘Baggage, he has a lot of baggage and once he gets up there all that baggage comes tumbling out.’”
    • Mitt Romney preps Newt Gingrich attack – Mitt Romney’s campaign advisers insist they’re no more scared of Newt Gingrich than the candidates who’ve surged before — but they’re already rolling out a playbook that shows they know the latest alarm isn’t a drill.

      They know the stakes are higher with five weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses and a challenger who now poses their most substantial threat. They’re preparing a robust, sustained attack that tags the former House speaker as a Washington insider and serial flip-flopper who can’t be trusted with the nation’s economy.

    • Florida shows perils of Gingrich for GOP – If the Newt surge persists over the next few months the biggest winner is going to be Barack Obama.  We can see that pretty clearly in our newest Florida poll.

      If Mitt Romney’s the Republican nominee, Obama’s in a lot of trouble in the Sunshine State. Obama leads Romney only 45-44, and given that the undecideds skew largely Republican he’d probably lose to Romney if the election was today. Obama being stuck in the mid-4os against Romney is par for the course in our Florida polling. In September Obama led 46-45, in June it was 47-43, and in March it was 46-44.  The dial has barely moved all year.

      But if Newt Gingrich is the Republican nominee it’s a completely different story.  Obama leads him 50-44 in a head to head. To find the last time a GOP Presidential candidate lost Florida by more than that you have to go all the way back to Thomas Dewey in 1948.  Even Barry Goldwater did better in Florida than Gingrich is right now.

    • Harkin Says Obama “Silent Cheering” for Gingrich – Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) held a telephone conference call with reporters and called the prospect of Newt Gingrich winning the Republican nomination as “heaven-sent.”

      Said Harkin: “Newt has never been one to engage mind before opening mouth. He engages mouth before engaging his mind sometimes, most of the time. That doesn’t bode well for him at all. I think there’s some, what I’m picking up around here is there’s a lot of quiet, silent cheering in the Obama Administration and the Obama campaign for Newt to get the nomination. It would be just be heaven-sent if he got the nomination.”

      He elaborated: “Someone once described the prospect of Newt getting the nomination, saying that, ‘Imagine that you’re standing in front of a door and behind that door all these suitcases are piled and you open the door and all the suitcases come tumbling out.’ Of course, I didn’t know what they were talking about. He said, ‘Baggage, he has a lot of baggage and once he gets up there all that baggage comes tumbling out.'”

    • President 2012: Ron Paul Attacks Newt Gingrich for Serial Hypocrisy – But Does it Matter? | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: Ron Paul Attacks Newt Gingrich for Serial Hypocrisy – But Does it Matter? #tcot #catcot
    • Are Smoking Interventions and Nicotine Replacement Treatments Effective Ways for Smokers to Quit | Smiles For A Lifetime – Temporary (Locum Tenens) Dentistry – Are Smoking Interventions and Nicotine Replacement Treatments Effective Ways for Smokers to Quit
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: December 1, 2011 – The Morning Drill: December 1, 2011
    • Dilbert December 1, 2011 – Say GoodBye » Flap’s California Blog – Dilbert December 1, 2011 – Say GoodBye
    • Occupy Wall Street Protesters Go After Obama | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Occupy Wall Street Protesters Go After Obama #tcot #catcot
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Chez Cole – The Starbucks is mighty fine this morning! (@ Chez Cole)
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-01 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-12-01 #tcot #catcot
    • Lessons of Electoral History? – Talk-show host Michael Medved, for example, apparently thinks the Republicans need a centrist presidential candidate in 2012. He said, “Most political battles are won by seizing the center.” Moreover, he added: “Anyone who believes otherwise ignores the electoral experience of the last 50 years.”

      But just when did Ronald Reagan, with his two landslide election victories, “seize the center”? For that matter, when did Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a record four consecutive presidential-election victories, “seize the center”?

      There have been a long string of Republican presidential candidates who seized the center — and lost elections. Thomas E. Dewey, for example, seized the center against Harry Truman in 1948. Even though Truman was so unpopular at the outset that The New Republic urged him not to run, and polls consistently had Dewey ahead, Truman clearly stood for something — and for months he battled for what he stood for.

    • Gingrich Holds Clear Lead Nationally – President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Gingrich 25% Vs. Romney 17% Vs. Cain 15% Vs. Paul 9%
    • Rep. Elton Gallegly and Friends Operation Toy Drop Deliver to Military Families on Sunday | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Rep. Elton Gallegly and Friends Operation Toy Drop Deliver to Military Families on Sunday #tcot #catcot
    • President 2012: Rick Perry Steps In It Again | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: Rick Perry Steps In It Again #tcot #catcot
    • Boeing, Machinists reach sweeping agreement – After secret talks that began in earnest in mid-October, Boeing and the Machinists union have reached a landmark tentative agreement that would ensure the 737MAX is built in Renton and lead to settlement of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case against the company.

      The deal may also bring more Air Force tanker work to the Puget Sound region.

      A four-year contract extension is also part of the pact, the union said at a news conference Wednesday.

      Members must approve the agreement, and union leaders who’ve endorsed the contract said it will be put to a swift vote next week.

      “The 737 MAX has landed here in the state of Washington,” said Tom Wroblewski, president of local district Lodge 751 of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). “This is a new day, the start of a new way of doing business.”

      Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief Jim Albaugh confirmed the deal in a statement.

    • President 2012 GOP Florida Poll Watch: Gingrich Crushing Romney 47% Vs. 17% | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 GOP Florida Poll Watch: Gingrich Crushing Romney 47% Vs. 17% #tcot #catcot
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: Study: 1 Out of 20 Dentists in Los Angeles County Will Not Treat HIV Positive Patients – Study: 1 Out of 20 Dentists in Los Angeles County Will Not Treat HIV Positive Patients
    • CA-Sen: Elizabeth Emken Won’t Self-Fund Senate Race Against Senator Dianne Feinstein » Flap’s California Blog – CA-Sen: Elizabeth Emken Won’t Self-Fund Senate Race Against Senator Dianne Feinstein
    • President 2012 Poll Watch: Gingrich 45% Vs. Obama 43% | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 Poll Watch: Gingrich 45% Vs. Obama 43% #tcot #catcot
    • Shopping for Dentistry on the Internet? | Smiles For A Lifetime – Temporary (Locum Tenens) Dentistry – Shopping for Dentistry on the Internet?
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: Test Post – November 30 – Test Post – November 30
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: November 30, 2011 – The Morning Drill: November 30, 2011
    • (404) http://www.flapsblog.net/2011/11/morning-drill-november-30-2011.html – The Morning Drill: November 30, 2011
    • The Morning Flap: November 30, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Morning Flap: November 30, 2011 #tcot #catcot
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: November 25, 2011

    November 25, 2011 /

    These are my links for November 23rd through November 25th:

    • An Electronic Eye on Hospital Hand-Washing – Beeps and blinking lights are the constant chatter of a hospital intensive care unit, but at the I.C.U.’s in North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., the conversation has some unusual contributors. Two L.E.D. displays adorn the wall across from each nurses’ station. They show the hand hygiene rate achieved: last Friday in the surgical I.C.U., the weekly rate was 85 percent and the current shift had a rate of 91 percent. “Great Shift!!” the sign said. At the medical I.C.U. next door, the weekly rate was 81 percent, and the current shift 82 percent.

      That’s too low for a “Great Shift!!” message. But by most standards, both I.C.U.’s are doing well. Those L.E.D. displays are very demanding — health care workers must clean their hands within 10 seconds of entering and exiting a patient’s room, or it doesn’t count. Three years ago, using the same criteria, the medical I.C.U.’s hand hygiene rate was appalling — it averaged 6.5 percent. But a video monitoring system that provides instant feedback on success has raised rates of hand-washing or use of alcohol rubs to over 80 percent, and kept them there.

    • First 5 LA chief to get sizable severance despite having quit – The board of First 5 LA will give its former chief executive officer an expensive severance package even after she resigned earlier this month following a critical audit of the agency.

      Evelyn V. Martinez submitted a letter on Nov. 10, saying the commissioners had required her to resign instead of being fired without cause from the independent Los Angeles County agency, which uses state cigarette taxes to fund health, safety and educational programs for children from birth to age 5.

      In her letter, Martinez said she was entitled to a lump sum payment equal to 12 months of salary and health benefits and her unused vacation. Martinez, who earned more than $240,000 annually, also said she should receive an additional month of pay and health benefit costs because she was not given a 30-day written notice.

    • Push against California’s redistricting maps moves forward – Republican activists trying to overturn some new voting districts cleared a significant hurdle toward putting the issue on the ballot by turning in petitions bearing hundreds of thousands of signatures.

      But the next step — verification of those names by county elections officials — could take long enough to stymie the proponents’ goal of getting new state Senate districts drawn by the state Supreme Court in time for next year’s elections.

      Secretary of State Debra Bowen has said that vetting all the signatures could take until mid-March, after the Feb. 23 deadline for some candidates to file for the June primary. The timing could mean that the maps drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission would be used until voters could weigh in on the November ballot.

      The referendum would allow voters the final word on the Senate maps. Dave Gilliard, a consultant who oversaw the $2.5-million signature drive for a group called Fairness and Accountability in Redistricting (FAIR), said the activists believe the state’s high court could act in time for the June elections. He said FAIR’s attorneys believe current redistricting law gives the court the authority to create new maps once signed petitions for the referendum have been filed.

    • NYT Claims Increasing Bipartisan Support for Plans that Could Raise the Cost of Medicare Policies by $34 Trillion – The NYT claims that plans that could raise the cost of Medicare equivalent policies for seniors by $34 trillion are gaining increasing support in Congress. These plans involve replacing Medicare with a voucher. This leads to higher costs both because the administrative costs of private plans are far higher than Medicare and they are likely to be less effective in controlling costs.

      The Congressional Budget Official projected that a Republican plan along these lines, that was approved by House earlier in this year, would raise the cost of Medicare equivalent polices by $34 trillion over the program’s 75-year planning horizon. While this plan would save the government money by reducing its payments for Medicare, it would mean that future generations of workers would pay far more for health care in their retirement. The cost of Medicare equivalent policies would far exceed the typical retiree’s income by 2050.

    • Support Builds for Premium Support Plan for Medicare – Though it reached no agreement, the special Congressional committee on deficit reduction built a case for major structural changes in Medicare that would limit the government’s open-ended financial commitment to the program, lawmakers and health policy experts say.

      Members of both parties told the panel that Medicare should offer a fixed amount of money to each beneficiary to buy coverage from competing private plans, whose costs and benefits would be tightly regulated by the government.

      Republicans have long been enamored of that idea. In the last few weeks, two of the Republican candidates for president, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have endorsed variations of it.

      The idea faces opposition from many Democrats, who say it would shift costs to beneficiaries and eliminate the guarantee of affordable health insurance for older Americans. But some Democrats say that — if carefully designed, with enough protections for beneficiaries — it might work.

      The idea is sometimes known as premium support, because Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government.

      “This is an idea that could easily resurface in the future as Congress seeks additional Medicare savings for deficit reduction,” said Patricia H. Neuman, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-25 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-25 #tcot #catcot
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Chez Bev Webb – Alice’s mom’s home for Thanksgiving – watching football (@ Chez Bev Webb)
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap’s Badges :: Superstar – I just unlocked the “Superstar” badge on @foursquare!
    • U.S. ranks 28th in life expectancy while we pay the MOST for health care | Mail Online – U.S. ranks 25th in life expectancy — lower than Chile and Greece…
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-24 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-24 #tcot #catcot
    • News from The Associated Press – RT @AP: #Bachmann receives apology from NBC after off-color song was played during her appearance on ‘Late Night’:
    • NationalJournal.com –
    • Wishing You a Happy Thanksgiving: November 24, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Wishing You a Happy Thanksgiving: November 24, 2011 #tcot #catcot
    • NationalJournal.com – Timeline of 2012 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses – Kenneth Chamberlain –
    • Medscape: Medscape Access – Medscape: Medscape Access
    • Timeline of 2012 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses – Kenneth Chamberlain – NationalJournal.com – RT @nationaljournal: TIMELINE: 2012 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses:
    • Medscape: Medscape Access – Coffee Linked to Lower Endometrial Cancer Risk
    • The Afternoon Flap: November 23, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Afternoon Flap: November 23, 2011 #tcot #catcot
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: November 23, 2011

    November 23, 2011 /

    These are my links for November 22nd through November 23rd:

    • The Gingrich Amnesty – By Mark Krikorian – Missed the debate because of wrestling practice, but it’s hardly surprising that Newt would support amnesty for illegal aliens. After the Pelosi global-warming ad and Dede Scozzafava and “right-wing social engineering,” is it any surprise he’d adopt the left’s line on immigration too? He earned a career grade of D from Numbers USA (they calculate back to 1989). Heck, even Barbara Boxer has a career grade of D+.

      But a couple more points are in order. First, there just aren’t very many illegal aliens who have been here 25 years, the duration Gingrich specified as warranting amnesty. The old INS estimated that there were about 5 million illegal aliens in 1996, and the growth rate had been about 300,000 a year, which means that 10 years earlier (i.e., 25 years ago), there would have been about 2 million illegal aliens. Of those, I would guess the majority have in the intervening quarter-century either gone home, died, or finagled a green card (at least one-quarter of each year’s green-card recipients — new “legal” immigrants — are illegal aliens using the federal immigration program to launder their status). So that’s fewer than 1 million people out of the current 11 million illegals who would be covered by the Gingrich Amnesty, and probably fewer than half a million.

      But wait — 25 years ago. Hmmmmm. That rings a bell. Did something happen back in 1986 with regard to immigration? Oh, yeah, I remember — Congress passed the one and only amnesty for illegal immigrants, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), that legalized close to 3 million illegals (there had been about 5 million, so about 2 million remained after the amnesty, because they didn’t meet the law’s requirements). That was supposed to be followed by tough enforcement to prevent future illegal immigration and to throw out the resident illegals who didn’t qualify for the amnesty (or who failed to lie their way to a green card, since a large share of those successfully claiming amnesty, perhaps as many as one-quarter, did so fraudulently — among the liars was Mahmud “The Red” Abouhalima, a leader of the first World Trade Center attack).

      So the Gingrich Amnesty would cover illegal immigrants here when Congress passed IRCA. That is to say, it would pick up where the previous amnesty left off, legalizing precisely those people who didn’t qualify for IRCA. This just underlines what a chump you have to be to support any deal offered you by amnesty supporters.

    • GOP Smackdown: Gingrich v. Romney – Whether the matchup between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney is the final bout on the GOP primary card is impossible to know. The whole season has been more like professional wrestling than boxing, with weird characters sporting implausible hair appearing out of nowhere to talk smack and explain why they are the greatest in the world. (I’m looking at you in particular, Mr. Trump.)

      Still, let’s assume for the moment that it’s a Gingrich-Romney contest.

      It’s quite a matchup. Romney has been brutalized for having too little personality, Gingrich for having way, way too much. Romney looks like the picture that comes with the frame. Gingrich looks like he should be ensconced in royal velvet as he gestures at you with a half-eaten turkey leg in one hand and a sloshing goblet of wine in the other. Romney seems terrified of fully committing to any idea. Gingrich speaks as if he just text-messaged with God.

    • Coffee Linked to Lower Endometrial Cancer Risk – Drinking at least 4 cups of coffee per day is associated with a lower risk for endometrial cancer, according to new data from the Nurses’ Health Study.

      Youjin Je, a doctoral candidate in the lab of Edward Giovannucci, MD, ScD, from the Department of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues published their findings online November 22 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

      “Coffee consumption may be related to endometrial cancer development due to the potential role of caffeine,” Dr. Giovannucci and colleagues write. “Several epidemiologic studies have reported an inverse association between coffee intake and endometrial cancer risk, but data from prospective studies are limited.”

      Therefore, the researchers prospectively examined the link between drinking coffee and endometrial cancer risk, using prospective data from the Nurses’ Health Study.

      The analysis included data from 67,470 women aged 34 to 59 years in 1980. Cumulative average coffee intake was determined by questionnaire. During 26 years of follow-up, researchers documented 672 cases of endometrial cancer.

    • Acetaminophen: Repeated Use of Slightly Too Much Can Be Fatal – Repeated doses of slightly too much acetaminophen (known as paracetamol in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe) can be fatal, according to the results of a large, single-center cohort study published online November 22 in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

      “On admission, these staggered overdose patients were more likely to have liver and brain problems, require kidney dialysis or help with breathing and were at a greater risk of dying than people who had taken single overdoses,” senior author Kenneth J. Simpson, MBChB (Hons), MD, FRCP (Edin), from the University of Edinburgh and Scottish Liver Transplant Unit in the United Kingdom, said in a news release.

      “They haven’t taken the sort of single-moment, one-off massive overdoses taken by people who try to commit suicide, but over time the damage builds up, and the effect can be fatal,” he adds.

      In the United Kingdom, acetaminophen hepatotoxicity is the leading cause of acute liver failure (ALF). However, the effect of a staggered overdose pattern or delayed hospital presentation on mortality or need for emergency liver transplantation was previously unknown.

    • Romney’s Mormon Faith Likely a Factor in Primaries, Not in a General Election – Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life – Many Americans continue to see the Mormon faith as unfamiliar and different. Half say they know little or nothing about Mormonism, half say it is a Christian religion while a third say it is not, and roughly two-thirds believe Mormonism is “very different” from their own beliefs. There has been virtually no change in these impressions over the past four years.

      About half of all voters, and 60% of evangelical Republicans, know that Mitt Romney is a Mormon. The former Massachusetts governor’s religion has implications for his nomination run but not for the general election, should he be nominated as his party’s standard bearer.

      White evangelical Protestants – a key element of the GOP electoral base – are more inclined than the public as a whole to view Mormonism as a non-Christian faith. And this view is linked to opinions about Romney: Republicans who say Mormonism is not a Christian religion are less likely to support Romney for the GOP nomination and offer a less favorable assessment of him generally. But they seem prepared to overwhelmingly back him in a run against Obama in the general election.

    • President 2012: Senator Thune Endorses Mitt Romney – Senator John Thune of South Dakota endorsed Mitt Romney’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday, making him the second conservative United States senator to declare support for Mr. Romney’s candidacy this week.

      Mr. Thune, who in February decided against running for president himself, made the announcement during a morning campaign stop in downtown Des Moines with Mr. Romney. The endorsement comes as Mr. Romney is intensifying his effort to compete in the Iowa caucuses, now less than six weeks away.

      “I’m so lucky he didn’t run,” Mr. Romney said, noting that more than a year ago his advisers warned that Mr. Thune could be one of the toughest potential Republican rivals. Mr. Thune was among the first in a long line of Republicans who decided against jumping into the 2012 presidential race.

    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-23 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-23 #tcot #catcot
    • Log In – The New York Times – Log In – The New York Times
    • Log In – The New York Times – Log In – The New York Times
    • Log In – The New York Times – RT @HotlineReid: RT @NYTObits: George Gallup Jr., of Polling Family, Dies at 81
    • Map of Flap’s Twitter followers – 62% of my followers are from #United States,11% from #California & 3% from #New York. . Where are yours?
    • RealClearPolitics – Gingrich May Have Inside Track on Palin’s Endorsement – Gingrich May Have Inside Track on Palin’s Endorsement
    • Fallon apologizes to Bachmann – CNN Political Ticker – CNN.com Blogs – TV show host Jimmy Fallon apologized to GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann via Twitter Tuesday
    • Video: President 2012 GOP Debate: Newt Gingrich on Immigration | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Video: President 2012 GOP Debate: Newt Gingrich on Immigration #tcot #catcot
    • Breitbart.tv » Bachmann: Newt Soft On Immigration – RT @allahpundit: Breitbart TV has Newt answer on immigration
    • Writers strike out not choosing Matt Kemp as MVP – latimes.com – Baseball Writers strike out not choosing Matt Kemp as MVP
    • New Major League Baseball Contract Limits Smokeless Tobacco Use | Smiles For A Lifetime – Temporary (Locum Tenens) Dentistry – New Major League Baseball Contract Limits Smokeless Tobacco Use
    • The Afternoon Flap: November 22, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Afternoon Flap: November 22, 2011 #tcot #catcot
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: November 22, 2011

    November 22, 2011 /

    These are my links for November 22nd from 08:26 to 15:01:

    • 10,000 Expected To Line Up For Free Turkey Dinners In South Los Angeles – Low-income residents and seniors are lining up for free turkey dinners from a local car company.As many as 10,000 people are expected to show up for the “23rd Annual Jackson Limousine Service Turkey Dinner Give-Away”, which started at 8 a.m. Tuesday.Sky2 was overhead Monday night as a line wrapped around the company’s service fleet yard at 3669 West Slauson Ave.Yvette Freeman, one of the first people to pick up a meal Tuesday morning, waited in line for two days with a group of family and friends.

      “It feels good. It feels really good,” says Freeman, who realized she couldn’t afford her own Thanksgiving dinner when she went to the grocery store last weekend.

      “It’s a lot of people, a lot of families from all walks of life,” EJ Jackson, founder and president of Jackson Limousine, told CBS2. “You’ll see them. We love them, but that’s what we are here for; to help one another.”

      Turkey and all the dinner fixings, including cornbread, yams and cranberry sauce, are being given out on a first-come, first-served basis.

    • Blago ally Tony Rezko gets 10 1/2 years, minus time served – A former top fundraiser for Rod Blagojevich was sentenced Tuesday to 10 1/2 years in prison for pressuring businesses for millions in kickbacks, an unusually stiff penalty that could portend a tough day for the former governor when he is sentenced for his own corruption convictions.Antoin “Tony” Rezko spent 3 1/2 years in custody awaiting sentencing on his 2008 convictions for fraud, money laundering and plotting to squeeze $7 million in kickbacks from companies that wanted to do business with the state during Blagojevich’s tenure. He will get credit for time served and will serve 85 percent of his total sentence.Attorneys for the former Chicago real estate developer and fast-food entrepreneur had asked that he be set free, saying he had served more time than others convicted as part of the federal investigation of Blagojevich.But U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve told Rezko his “selfish and corrupt actions” had damaged the trust people have in their government and cited his repeated lies about his role in the schemes.
    • Obama heckled by protesters at New Hampshire speech – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room – President Obama was heckled on Tuesday during an appearance at a New Hampshire high school.Obama had traveled north to the Granite State, which holds the nation’s first presidential primary, to discuss the economy and his proposal to extend a current payroll tax cut.Just as the president started his speech, protesters, apparently from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, used the “human mic” technique to amplify their voices. It was unclear what the protesters were saying, or what point they were attempting to make.The president smiled through the disruption, saying: “No, it’s OK,” as other parts of the crowd sought to hush the protesters by chanting his name and old campaign slogan, “Yes We Can.”
    • More hacked climate emails surface ahead of UN conference – What’s a United Nations climate conference without an email controversy?A second trove of hacked emails among climate scientists has surfaced, marking the second time in three years that internal emails from a prominent U.K. research institute have been made public ahead of international global warming talks.A file with 5,000 emails that was anonymously posted on the Internet earlier Tuesday appears to have been hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
      The documents include emails from Michael Mann, a prominent climatologist that currently works at Pennsylvania State University, and other scientists that were at the center of the 2009 email release, the BBC reported Tuesday.A link to the emails went dead Tuesday afternoon.
    • My Radio Assessment of Gingrich’s Chances Against Obama – Last week on my “Hillyer Time” radio show, my opening monologue explained why I think it’s ludicrous to think Newt Gingrich could possible win a general-election battle against Barack Obama – analysis that stands regardless of whether one personally likes the idea of Gingrich in the Oval Office if he should pull off the miracle and win anyway. Some people wanted to be able to read what I said.
      So, slightly adapted from radio notes for reading ease, here’s what I said:  Welcome to Hillyer Time….

      For now, I really need to vent. I am absolutely flabbergasted at what I see in the latest Republican polls for president. What I see looks like a mass political suicide attempt — so determined to commit suicide that it uses too many pills, plus a slit wrist, plus a gun, on the ledge of a 1,000-foot building, just to make sure that at least one of the methods succeeds.

      What I’m talking about is the rise of Newt Gingrich to the front of the Republican pack. If this isn’t mass suicide, is mass amnesia of a particularly dangerous variety. And, politically speaking, if it continues it will be an absolute guarantee of Barack Obama’s re-election next Fall.

      Why? Well, for months I’ve said… … that Mitt Romney was the only legitimate contender the Republicans could choose who could NOT make a case against Obama’s biggest area of weakness, which is Obamacare, because Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health plan was almost the exact model for Obamacare. It doesn’t matter how he spins it, Romney can’t make a cogent case against it.

      But the reason I said Romney was the only one was because I didn’t consider Gingrich a legitimate contender. Well, if he is a serious contender, he becomes the second person who can’t make a case against Obamacare, especially against its individual mandate. Gingrich has supported an individual mandate for almost 18 years, has written in favor of it as recently as 2008, and even several times this year has defended it in concept.

      So Gingrich can’t make a case against Obamacare.

    • Obama’s Economic Quackery – Sometimes the wrong medicine can make a struggling patient far sicker than he would have been had he been allowed to recover naturally. Western medicine began with the premise that the physician either must know how to cure the patient or simply leave him alone — but above all not make him worse through harmful treatment.As 2011 ends, we have discovered how to turn a natural recovery from a near-record recession into a serial slowdown. Almost every haphazard, ad hoc attempt by Barack Obama to jumpstart the economy has only further stalled it. The president has never articulated a diagnosis of why the economy was stalled, never outlined a coherent treatment plan, and so cannot offer a prognosis. If we have a sick budget, a Byzantine tax code, bankrupting entitlements and long-term debt burden, and a costly imported-oil bill, one would never know all that from the president, who has never offered any sort of plan for addressing these crises.
    • Marines Over Medicaid – To the great surprise of nobody, another blue-ribbon panel of Washington’s A-list nabobs has failed at its task: In this case, it is the so-called supercommittee charged with nudging the federal government away from the edge of the debt abyss. Investors despaired at the news, and there was talk of a second downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt.The failure of the supercommittee is a testament to Democrats’ tax obsession. With the supercommittee having fizzled, the next step is the automatic sequestration process, which imposes 50 percent of the cuts on a program that accounts for only 20 percent of spending (national defense) while leaving the entitlements largely untouched. But the country needs the Marines more than it needs Medicaid.
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: California Dental Association Sues the California Department of Healthcare Services Over Medicaid Payments to Dentists – California Dental Association Sues the California Department of Healthcare Services Over Medicaid Payments to Dentists
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: November 22, 2011 – The Morning Drill: November 22, 2011
    • President 2012 Poll Watch: Newt Gingrich Now Leading in Positive Intensity | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 Poll Watch: Newt Gingrich Now Leading in Positive Intensity #tcot #catcot
    • Capitol Alert: Rick Perry to raise money at private fundraiser in Sacramento – Money for nothing…..RT @CapitolAlert: Rick Perry to raise money at private fundraiser in Sacramento
    • Who’s More Likely to Beat Obama? – t’s becoming increasingly hard to say whether Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, the two leading Republican presidential candidates, would fare better against Barack Obama. The latest Rasmussen poll of likely voters shows Gingrich trailing Obama by just 6 percentage points — 46 to 40 percent. Less than a month and a half ago, Gingrich trailed Obama by 15 points (49 to 34 percent). Meanwhile, Romney trails Obama by just 1 point — 43 to 42 percent.Taking the longer view, Romney has been remarkably consistent in his matchups with Obama. Across 11 Rasmussen surveys of likely voters over the past six months, Romney has always been within a 6-point range versus Obama — between 38 and 44 percent. Likewise, Obama has always been within a 6-point range versus Romney — between 40 and 46 percent. However, with his slightly higher levels of support, Obama has gone 7-4 versus Romney in these matchups.  Moreover, while Romney and Obama split the first six matchups, Obama has won four of the past five.
    • Dropbox
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    • President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Gingrich 26% Vs. Romney 22% Vs. Cain 14% Vs. Paul 6% Vs. Perry 6% | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Gingrich 26% Vs. Romney 22% Vs. Cain 14% Vs. Paul 6% Vs. Perry 6% #tcot #catcot
    • Doctors amputate frostbitten feet of Alaska runner – An All-American distance runner who spent more than two days in freezing winter temperatures without winter gear has had his legs amputated just above the ankles.Marko Cheseto, 28, is one of several Kenyan runners who competed for the University of Alaska Anchorage in cross-country and track. The amputations were reported Monday on the UAA Athletic Department website.Cheseto was seen at about 7 p.m. in a UAA building on Nov. 6, a Sunday night, as two snow storms started to blanket the city. His roommates reported him missing the next morning. The disappearance prompted a citywide search.
    • Occupy L.A. receives offer to decamp – Los Angeles officials have offered Occupy L.A. protesters a package of incentives that includes downtown office space and farmland in an attempt to persuade them to abandon their camp outside of City Hall, according to several demonstrators who have been in negotiations with the city.The details of the proposal were revealed Monday during the demonstration’s nightly general assembly meeting by Jim Lafferty, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who has been advocating on behalf of the protest since it began seven weeks ago.Lafferty said city officials have offered protesters a $1-a-year lease on a 10,000-square-foot office space near City Hall. He said officials also promised land elsewhere for protesters who wish to farm, as well as additional housing for the contingent of homeless people who joined the camp.
    • Mitt Romney Is First GOP Presidential Hopeful to Book Hollywood Fundraiser – Polls show that Mitt Romney is first in the hearts of California Republicans, and he’ll be the first of the party’s presidential hopefuls to visit Los Angeles for a fundraiser Dec. 6 at the Beverly Hills Hotel.Hedge fund manager Josh Friedman and his wife, Beth, are the hosts, along with Eva and Marc Stein and Tracy and Gene Sykes of Goldman Sachs.
    • Romney coming after L.A. money – LA Observed – RT @LAObserved: Romney coming after L.A. money.
    • Should Dentists Be Vaccinated Against Influenza and Pertussis? | Smiles For A Lifetime – Temporary (Locum Tenens) Dentistry – Should Dentists Be Vaccinated Against Influenza and Pertussis?
    • Rising to top of GOP polls, Gingrich beefs up campaign staff – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room – RT @briefingroom: Rising to top of GOP polls, Gingrich beefs up campaign staff
    • The Morning Flap: November 22, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Morning Flap: November 22, 2011 #tcot #catcot
  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: November 21, 2011

    November 21, 2011 /

    These are my links for November 21st from 08:13 to 14:38:

    • Boehner blames Obama for failure of supercommittee to reach a deal – House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is blaming President Obama for the failure of the congressional supercommittee to reach a deal for cutting the federal deficit.The Speaker’s office sent out a memo Monday morning that says the supercommittee “was unable to reach agreement because President Obama and Washington Democrats insisted on dramatic tax hikes on American job creators, which would make our economy worse.”The memo from Boehner’s office says Obama set the deficit panel up for failure by demanding it become the vehicle for economic stimulus.

      “The President designed a political strategy that doomed the committee to failure first by insisting the committee include $450 billion of his failed stimulus policies in any agreement, making deficit reduction much harder and second by issuing a veto threat warning he would not accept an agreement that did not include a job-killing tax increase,” the memo obtained by The Hill states.

      The memo was not signed by the Speaker, as is customary for messages that come directly from him.

    • Super Committee Fails to Reach Deficit Agreement – The bipartisan congressional committee tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction announced on Monday it cannot reach agreement by the Wednesday deadline, a stark if not unexpected admission that its efforts have ended in failure.”After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline,” the co-chairs, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said.The declaration came late Monday afternoon in a written statement from the 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction despite last-second discussions in closed-door meetings.

      The committee, in the end, could not resolve that Republicans would not go as far as Democrats wanted on allowing more revenue raisers, and Democrats did not want to move on entitlement reforms. Intense messaging by both political parties on which was more to blame is surely to spill out for days, if not months.

      The super panel was created with extraordinary, fast-track powers this summer under the law agreed to by Republicans and Democrats during the debt ceiling crisis. That same law now says its failure will trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts over 10 years, starting in 2013. That so-called sequestration is to include cuts to Pentagon spending.

    • When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable? – If we trace liberal disappointment with President Obama to its origins, to try to pinpoint the moment when his crestfallen supporters realized that this was Not Change They Could Believe In, the souring probably began on December 17, 2008, when Obama announced that conservative Evangelical pastor Rick Warren would speak at his inauguration. “Abominable,” fumed John Aravosis on AmericaBlog. “Obama’s ‘inclusiveness’ mantra always seems to head only in one direction—an excuse to scorn progressives and embrace the Right,” seethed Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow rode the story almost nightly: “I think the problem is getting larger for Barack Obama.” Negative 34 days into the start of the Obama presidency, the honeymoon was over.Since then, the liberal gloom has only deepened, as Obama compromise alternated with Obama failure. Liberals speak of Obama in unceasingly despairing terms. “I’m exhausted [from] defending you,” one supporter confessed to Obama at a town-hall meeting last year.“We are all incredibly frustrated,” Justin Ruben, MoveOn’s executive director, told the Washington Post in September. “I’m disappointed in Obama,” complained Steve Jobs, according to Walter Isaacson’s new biography. The assessments appear equally morose among the most left-wing and the most moderate of Obama’s supporters, among opinion leaders and rank-and-file voters. In early 2004, Democrats, by a 25-point margin, described themselves as “more enthusiastic than usual about voting.” At the beginning of 2008, the margin had shot up to over 60 percentage points. Now as many Democrats say they’re less enthusiastic about voting as say they’re more enthusiastic.
    • We’ve All Gone Crazy – Unlike David Brooks — I walk out of room the minute he starts talking — David Frum is someone I consider a friend, which causes me to get a lot of heat from some of my conservative friends, including those friends whom Frum has attacked by name.Frum stubbornly believes he’s right (and also, Right), and any attempt to argue him out of his position is doomed to failure, simply because it’s his position and he feels honor-bound to defend it. Being rather mule-headed myself, I can relate to that, even when I know Frum is wrong, wrong, wrong (as is anyone who disagrees with me). However, I believe the point of arguments among conservatives is always to find the best way to stomp liberalism into smithereens. And I wish Frum would stop carping so much about conservatives, and start stomping some liberals.Read it all
    • David Frum on the GOP’s Lost Sense of Reality – It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John ­McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.
    • Gallup poll: Is the Gingrich surge overrated? – In the latest Gallup GOP national poll, Mitt Romney (21 percent) and Newt Gingrich (22 percent) are in a statistical tie among registered Republican and Republican-leaning voters. Herman Cain has dropped to third (16 percent), with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (8 percent) now behind even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) (9 percent).What is interesting is the Gingrich surge at the onset of his first round of rigorous scrutiny has him much lower than the peak for Perry (29 percent). A GOP operative says he’s not surprised. “[Gingrich is] more of a known commodity, and not always in a good sense. Therefore he’s less likely to see a full-scale swoon.” Republican consultant Tony Fratto says the terrain is also different now than when Perry entered with a splash. He tells me, “Perry and Cain haven’t lost all of their elevated support, just part. So there’s less for Gingrich to capture. And Romney’s support stays fairly consistent.”Probably……
    • Will GOP NLRB Member Resign to Shut Down Labor Agency? – On November 30, the National Labor Relations Board is scheduled to vote on proposed rule changes that would speed up union elections by disallowing some appeals until after a workplace vote occurs. Employers typically aim to delay an election so that they can use the time to intimidate employees to voting against a union.But that vote may never take place, because some conservative members of Congress are pushing a plan that would force the NLRB, which is an independent federal agency tasked with enforcing labor law, to shut down. There are currently three people serving on the NLRB; if that is reduced by one, the body will be unable to issue valid rulings.In New Process Steel, L.P. vs National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the NLRB cannot decide cases with only two members on the NLRB. For 27 months, during the last year of President Bush’s term and the first 14 months of the Obama administration, the NLRB only had two members (a Democrat and a Republican). The two members agreed to work together on common sense cases where they could easily agree on a ruling; they passed judgment in nearly 600 cases.

      But the Supreme Court invalidated all those rulings because they were made with only two members. Therefore, some conservative politicians such as South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and prominent right-wing blogs such as RedState.com are pushing for Republican NLRB Board Member Brian Hayes to resign before the vote for the rules is issued on November 30, which would effectively shut down the agency.

    • Spirit Airlines’ deceptive Tweets land a U.S. fine – MarketWatch – Oh MY! | RT @WSJ:Spirit Airlines has been fined $50,000 for tweets advertising $9 fares that didn’t disclose add’l fees
    • Federal lawmakers restore $12.5 million to program for methamphetamine lab cleanup – The war on methamphetamine has gotten some support from Congress — millions of dollars to clean up the toxic waste generated by clandestine meth labs.President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging appropriations bill Friday that included the restoration of $12.5 million for meth lab cleanup.0

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      “It’s an awesome thing,” said Tommy Farmer, state meth task force coordinator for Tennessee, the state that led the nation in the number of meth labs in 2010. “It keeps us in the fight so we can combat these things.”

      The measure restores funding lost in February, when federal meth lab cleanup money through the Community Oriented Policing Services program ran out, and was not renewed. The program provided $19.2 million for meth lab cleanup in 2010.

    • Why Can’t Newspapers Make Money Online? – The bottom line is this: the reason that newspapers can’t make money is because they’re pricing themselves out of the market. It’s true that newspaper circulation has declined due to competition of various new media (check out Newspaper Death Watch if you really want to get depressed), and newspaper ad expenditures have declined along with them since 2001. But the real problem seems to be that newspapers have been way too slow in responding to competitive pressures by lowering their ad rates to a competitive level. Lulled into complacency by decades (if not centuries) of dominating the advertising industry, they’ve failed to recognize that when it comes to advertiser value, they’ve long since fallen from the top spot. The advantages they once had based on geographic exclusivity, readership, and exclusive content have been eliminated by the rise of the web. Today you can get your news from a huge number of sources other than the local bundle of papers tossed on your doorstep; and you (as a consumer) can get it for free. Craigslist and Facebook and Yelp and blogs and job listing sites and myriad other sources of local content have drained away readership and, more importantly, have all but negated the exclusive lock that newspapers used to have on local content. Advertisers who want to reach local audiences now have a huge amount of options and don’t have to be held hostage to the rates newspapers got used to charging.“News” has now become a commodity, yet the papers continue to charge premium prices. Unless they can figure out how to pare down costs, price themselves competitively, and, more importantly, offer content that’s worth paying for (see The Wall Street Journal), desperation tactics such as paywalls are only going to hasten the inevitable decline.
    • Dilbert November 20, 2011 – To Catch a Thief » Flap’s California Blog – Dilbert November 20, 2011 – To Catch a Thief
    • President 2012: Newt Gingrich – Really? | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012: Newt Gingrich – Really? #tcot #catcot
    • George Will | Newt Gingrich | Ron Paul | Mediaite – George Will Dismisses Newt Gingrich, Scoffs At Idea That He Is A ‘Historian’ #tcot
    • Democrats Pray for Newt – Democrats Pray for Newt #tcot
    • (500) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/conservatives-shouldnt-kid-themselves-about-newt/2011/11/20/gIQA9RhhhN_blog.html – Conservatives shouldn’t kid themselves about Newt #tcot #teaparty
    • Only 12% Expect Value of Their Home To Increase In Next Year – Rasmussen Reports™ – Poll Watch: Only 12% Expect Value of Their Home To Increase In Next Year #tcot
    • Untitled (http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/us/politics/deficit-deal-fell-apart-after-seeming-agreement.html&OQ=_rQ3D4Q26adxnnlQ3D1Q26pagewantedQ3DallQ26adxnnlxQ3D1321891541-qqfPM1wiKQ51yi2VQ2BBJWqRqAQ26utm_sourceQ3Dtwitt – Deficit Deal Fell Apart After Seeming Agreement
    • Do Overweight People Eat LESS Often? | Smiles For A Lifetime – Temporary (Locum Tenens) Dentistry – Do Overweight People Eat LESS Often?
    • Where Michigan stands on 2012 race for president | Detroit Free Press | freep.com – President 2012 Michigan Poll Watch: Romney 46% Vs. Obama 41%
    • The Morning Flap: November 21, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Morning Flap: November 21, 2011 #tcot #catcot

  • Pinboard Links,  The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: November 18, 2011

    November 18, 2011 /

    These are my links for November 17th through November 18th:

    • Poll: Romney, Gingrich in statistical dead heat in N.H. – Two things are true about New Hampshire Republican primary voters. They vote for people they know. And they love an underdog with a comeback story.Four years ago it was the weathered but feisty veteran John McCain who revived his once hanging-by-a-thread campaign to win the nation’s leadoff primary.And so it seems almost fated that after political observers have scratched their heads for months wondering who will emerge as the non-Romney candidate in the Granite State, the voters’ eyes should turn to Newt Gingrich, a man who was Speaker of the House during the previous century and whose own campaign was left for dead last summer.

      The latest NH Journal poll of likely Republican primary voters conducted by Magellan Strategies shows Romney and Gingrich in a statistical dead heat for the January 10th primary. If the election were held today, Romney would earn 29% of the vote and Gingrich would earn 27%. Texas Congressman Ron Paul continues to show resolve by earning 16%. Herman Cain gets 10%. No other candidate is in double digits.

    • Big Labor shells out for GOP friends – For House Republicans, it pays to be a friend of Big Labor.Major unions are giving a heftier slice of campaign donations than usual to pro-labor Republicans this election cycle, even as overall union contributions to members of Congress lags.Labor insiders say there’s extra incentive to support their GOP friends this cycle as unions look to reward lawmakers who rebuff their leadership on key votes, ingratiate themselves to freshman Republicans and ward off primary challengers as many tea party candidates campaign on anti-union platforms.

      Overall this cycle, about 13 percent of labor groups’ political action committee contributions — just over $2 million — have gone toward GOP candidates, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s still dwarfed by the nearly $14 million in union cash that’s gone to Democrats this cycle, but the GOP appears to be gaining ground with union donors after receiving only 6 percent of total contributions in 2010 and 8 percent in the 2008 cycle.

    • Occupy Wall Street: Anne Hathaway joins protesters but surely she’s in the 1%? – She is one of Hollywood’s highest paid actresses and lives a very privileged lifestyle that 99 per cent of people can only dream of.Still, Anne Hathaway acted as an average Joe and accompanied hundreds of protestors as she joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan’s Union Square.The 29-year-old, who is worth a reported $58 million, was pictured marching with protesters and sticking it to the man yesterday in The Big Apple.
    • Sarah Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street – Mark Twain famously wrote, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Peter Schweizer’s new book, “Throw Them All Out,” reveals this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory. (Full disclosure: Mr. Schweizer is employed by my political action committee as a foreign-policy adviser.)Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians’ stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers’? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.
    • Ventura County Official Announces Bid in New California District – Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett (D) announced on Wednesday that he will seek California’s new 26th district seat.“I am running for Congress because Ventura County residents deserve common sense leadership that is not locked into rigid ideology at the expense of the common good,” Bennett said in a statement. “I have demonstrated that leadership for Ventura County residents here at the county level for 10 years. We have made major improvements in the fiscal health of Ventura County.”The Ventura-based district race is not expected to feature a current incumbent next year, as Rep. Elton Gallegly (R) was drawn into the neighboring 25th district and has yet to say where or whether he will run.

      No Republicans have announced for the seat yet, but two other Democrats have: Moorpark City Councilman David Pollock and former professional tennis player David Cruz Thayne.

    • 26th District Democratic Town Hall – The first Congressional Candidates Town Hall meeting is being held tonight for the new 26th district.The Ventura City Democratic Club is hosting the event at the E.P. Foster Library at 7pm.The declared candidates include businessman David Cruz Thayne, Moorpark City Councilman David Pollock and Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett.
    • The 10 states that will determine control of the House in 2012 – 2. California: The nation’s biggest state has been an electoral afterthought for some time, going a nearly a decade with only one congressional seat changing hands between 2002 and 2010. That won’t happen again. At least three GOP-held seats are likely to go Democratic in the newly reshuffled map crafted by the state’s new citizen’s redistricting commission. But Democrats think they can run up the score even more, while the GOP strategists believe they can win Democratic-held seats elsewhere to even the score. We could see the results spanning from a total wash to Democrats gaining eight seats. Anything on the top end of that scale would be a major Democratic win.
    • @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-18 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – @Flap Twitter Updates for 2011-11-18 #tcot #catcot
    • foursquare :: Gregory Flap @ Los Angeles Chinatown – Heading home after an afternoon at LA auto show (@ Los Angeles Chinatown)
    • California Proposition 8 Sponsors Protect Marriage Legally Entitled to Defend Measure » Flap’s California Blog – California Proposition 8 Sponsors Protect Marriage Legally Entitled to Defend Measure
    • Lockerz.com : Los Angeles Dodgers’s Photo – RT @Dodgers: Congrats to Clayton Kershaw on winning the #CyYoung! Enjoy your celebratory champagne!
    • House Leaders Plan Facebook Hackathon – While House Republican and Democratic leaders are finding it difficult to agree on spending cuts, they are coming together next month for Capitol Hill’s first-ever Facebook Hackathon. The goal is to find new ways to use the social network to make information about the legislative process more transparent and to help members of the public more easily engage with lawmakers.Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican leader, and Representative Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland and his party’s whip, are co-hosting the event, scheduled for Dec. 7 in the U.S. Capitol, which will include Facebook engineers, independent software developers, advocates for the open data movement and members of Congress.Hackathon is a term used to describe an event where programmers come together to build applications in a collaborative process.

      “There is a lot of opportunity to improve the process,” said Matt Lira, digital director for Mr. Cantor. “We are going to sit down in a bipartisan way and look at how we can tackle some of these problems. We are hoping to get as many engineers as possible. They will have a unique opportunity to help make democracy work better.”

    • Untitled (http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/20111115econToplines.pdf) – President 2012 GOP Poll Watch: Gingrich 23% Vs. Cain 21% Vs. Romney 19% Vs. Paul 7% Vs. Perry 6%
    • In Debates, Newt Gingrich’s Real Target Is Obama – It’s an open question whether Gingrich can defeat Obama in 2012. It’s taken as a truism that he has “too much baggage.” Well, some of the baggage is lighter than it appears. He was cleared by the Clinton-era Internal Revenue Service of wrongdoing in alleged ethics violations stemming from a college course he taught in the 1990s. The charge that he surprised his cancer-stricken first wife with divorce papers has been, at the least, exaggerated.
    • (500) http://flapsblog.com/2011/11/17/poll-watch-u-s-unemployment-rate-increases-in-mid-november/ – Poll Watch: U.S. Unemployment Rate Increases in Mid-November #tcot #catcot
    • (500) http://smilesforalifetime.com/index.php/2011/11/poll-watch-smoking-rates-range-from-a-high-of-29-in-kentucky-to-low-of-11-in-utah/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=poll-watch-smoking-rates-range-from-a-high-of-29-in-kentucky-to-low-of-11-i – Poll Watch: Smoking Rates Range From a High of 29% in Kentucky to Low of 11% in Utah
    • Occupy Wall Street | Liveblog live blogging | Reuters.com – RT @Reuters: Live coverage of Occupy Wall Street #OWS
    • Ruling on Prop 8, Same Sex Marriage to Come From California Supreme Court | TheBlaze.com – RT @theblaze: Calif. Supreme Court to Issue Pivotal Gay Marriage Ruling Today via @theblaze
    • AD-66: Former California Governor George Deukmejian Endorses Nathan Mintz » Flap’s California Blog – AD-66: Former California Governor George Deukmejian Endorses Nathan Mintz
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: November 17, 2011 – The Morning Drill: November 17, 2011
    • (500) http://flapsblog.com/2011/11/17/the-morning-flap-november-17-2011/ – The Morning Flap: November 17, 2011 #tcot #catcot
  • The Afternoon Flap

    The Afternoon Flap: November 14, 2011

    November 14, 2011 /

     

    These are my links for November 14th from 06:42 to 16:16:

    • USC enrolls the most international students in the nation – For the 10th year in a row, USC held on to a championship that has nothing to do with sports: The Los Angeles campus once again enrolled the most foreign students of any college or university in the United States, according to a new study. UCLA had the sixth-highest international enrollment, up from seventh place the year before.

      Across the country, the ranks of international students enrolled in American higher education last year increased 5%, to 723,277, according to the annual report by the Institute of International Education, a New York nonprofit, in partnership with the U.S. State Department.

      China, for the second consecutive year, sent the largest group, which was up 22% to about 158,000. Indian students were the next-biggest contingent, followed by those from South Korea, Canada, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Vietnam, Mexico and Turkey, the report found.

      USC enrolled 8,615 international students last year, up from 7,987 the previous year, said the study, “Open Doors,” which is being released Monday. UCLA enrolled 6,249 international students, compared with 5,685 the prior year. Aside from the Los Angeles campuses, the other schools in the top 10 were: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, New York University, Purdue University, Columbia University, Ohio State University, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan State University and Harvard University.

      USC has recruiting offices in Shanghai; Seoul; Mumbai, India; Taipei, Taiwan; and Mexico City, said Timothy Brunold, the university’s admission dean. About 70% of international students at USC are in graduate programs, heavily concentrated in engineering, computer science and business, he added.

    • Herman Cain collapsing in new CNN poll – For weeks, polls have shown former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain holding strong despite the revelation of sexual harassment allegations against him. Now, his support is starting to collapse.

      A new CNN poll finds Cain dropping 11 points among Republicans, from 25 percent in October to 14 percent on Monday. That puts him in a statistical tie for third place in the GOP nominating contest with Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

      Even as most Republicans continue to say that the allegations have no effect on their vote, Cain is sliding downward.

      “Roughly four in 10 Republicans think this is a serious matter and tend to believe the women who made those charges,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.

      The likely explanation: Cain supporters were looking for a viable conservative alternative before jumping ship. Polls had shown growing concern over the allegations for weeks, even as the Republican’s overall numbers stayed strong.

      Those supporters appear to have settled on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich , who jumped from 8 percent to 22 percent in the CNN poll.

      Other polls found Cain slipping, although not as dramatically as in the CNN survey.

    • Newt Gingrich vs. debt supercommittee on campaign trail – Newt Gingrich is a major player in the GOP presidential contest again, and he’s using that platform to position himself as the biggest critic of the congressional debt-reduction “supercommittee.”

      Gingrich, who placed second nationally in a poll released Monday by CNN and Opinion Research, said at an event here this morning that the supercommittee is “maniacally stupid” and “an invitation to economic catastrophe.”

      The former House speaker said the panel should drop the provision passed by Congress during the summer that would trigger broad cuts if it can’t reach a deal by its Nov. 23 deadline. He said that Americans should be skeptical of any plan produced by the supercommittee and shouldn’t settle for a halfway measure just because of the trigger provision.

      “We should reject any effort to blackmail us into accepting a dumb idea on the grounds that in July we accepted an even dumber idea,” Gingrich said.

      Gingrich said a threat of massive cuts to defense and domestic program was totally artificial anyway and that the creation of the special debt-reduction panel in the first place is a reflection of Washington’s problems.

    • Bialek’s ex-boyfriend, Victor Zuckerman, speaks about Herman Cain – The ex-boyfriend of Sharon Bialek corroborated the sexual harassment allegations that Bialek made against Herman Cain, saying at a Monday press conference that Cain did in fact know the Chicago woman, something he has repeatedly denied.

      Victor Zuckerman, who identified himself as a pediatrician and a registered Republican, said that Bialek spent time with Cain, and that he remembers her saying that she was seated next to Cain at a dinner, and ”had opportunities to speak to him at length.”

      “She told me I needed to meet this man of warmth, of wit,” he recalled, adding that Cain later told them about the release of his gospel album in 1997.

      After Bialek lost her job at the fundraising arm of the educational foundation at the National Restaurant Association, it was Zuckerman who advised her to reach out to Cain, the former head of the NRA in the mid 1990s, for help.

      Bialek claims that during her trip to Washington for job advice, Cain groped her in a car.

      “I can confirm that when she returned, she was upset, she said that something had happened and the Mr. Cain had touched her in an inappropriate manner,” Zuckerman said. “She said she had handled it.”

      Zuckerman said that more recently, he and Bialek talked about Cain after the allegations came to light, and Bialek said that the accusations didn’t surprise her.

    • foursquare

      :: Gregory Flap @ Starbucks – Going to a comedy club in Pasadena after Alice gets off work. (@ Starbucks)

    • foursquare

      :: Gregory Flap’s Badges :: Fresh Brew – I just unlocked the “Fresh Brew” badge on @foursquare! Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffee.

    • CA-25: Rep. Elton Gallegly to Face Off Against Rep. Buck McKeon? | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – CA-25: Rep. Elton Gallegly to Face Off Against Rep. Buck McKeon? #tcot #catcot
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: Run for Her 5 K Race Report: November 13, 2011 – Run for Her 5 K Race Report: November 13, 2011
    • Want to Lose Weight? Don’t Tell Anyone! | Smiles For A Lifetime – Temporary (Locum Tenens) Dentistry – Want to Lose Weight? Don’t Tell Anyone!
    • President 2012 California Poll Watch: All Obama – All of the Time » Flap’s California Blog – President 2012 California Poll Watch: All Obama – All of the Time
    • Isakson introduces bill to reverse NLRB decision – U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson has introduced legislation that would reverse a recent decision from the National Labor Relations Board on collective bargaining.
      The board in August said that as few as two or three employees could form micro-bargaining units, or “mini-unions,” to engage in collective bargaining with employers. Isakson said the administration’s decision to allow micro-bargaining units “recklessly disregards the long-standing principles of collective bargaining” and said President Barack Obama’s appointees at the NLRB are tipping the scales in favor of unions.
      Isakson’s legislation would reinstate the traditional standard for determining which employees make up an appropriate bargaining unit.
      The Georgia Republican’s bill -The Representation Fairness Restoration Act – has 28 cosponsors.
    • Boeing: Union Reneged On Deal; NLRB Emails Shed Light – Newly released documents regarding the National Labor Relations Board complaint vs. Boeing reveal that extensive, though ultimately futile, efforts were made to avoid litigation.

      Boeing (BA) officials say the documents relate to a settlement that they thought they had made with the International Association of Machinists, the union that brought the complaint.

      The aerospace giant claims IAM revoked the offer after Boeing had accepted it. If true, that would suggest that IAM was interested in pursuing the case as a test of the NLRB’s power under the Obama administration.

    • Despite Senate victory, court battle looms for net-neutrality rules – Advocates of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules celebrated a major victory on Thursday as the Senate rejected a Republican bid to repeal the rules.
      But with a lawsuit pending in the D.C. Court of Appeals, the victory may prove to be short-lived.

       

      The rules, approved by the FCC in December, prohibit Internet service providers from slowing down or blocking access to legitimate websites. Supporters of the rules say they preserve competition and consumer choice, but opponents argue they are an unnecessary burden on businesses and amount to government control of the Internet.

    • President 2012 GOP Iowa Poll Watch: Cain 20% Vs. Gingrich 19% Vs. Romney 14% Vs. Bachmann and Paul 10% | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 GOP Iowa Poll Watch: Cain 20% Vs. Gingrich 19% Vs. Romney 14% Vs. Bachmann and Paul 10% #tcot #catcot
    • President 2012 California Poll Watch: All Obama – All of the Time | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – President 2012 California Poll Watch: All Obama – All of the Time #tcot #catcot
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Daily Extraction: Dr. Tommy Murph’s Costa Rica Extraction Courses – The Daily Extraction: Dr. Tommy Murph’s Costa Rica Extraction Courses
    • Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: November 14, 2011 – The Morning Drill: November 14, 2011
    • Day By Day November 12, 2011 – Word | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Day By Day November 12, 2011 – Word #tcot #catcot
    • The Morning Flap: November 14, 2011 | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The Morning Flap: November 14, 2011 #tcot #catcot