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March 15, 2012. Obama could've changed everything. So says the left (including Krugman). If Obama had just started his presidency with strong speeches attacking Wall Street (like Roosevelt) and explaining the need for Keynesian economics, middle America would've rallied around the left agenda; the Democrats would've won a landslide in the midterms, and Congress would've passed enough job stimulus to pull us right out of the recession. The right would have been knocked on their collective asses. But ...
But, pay no attention to these random facts, and instead, read Ezra Klein's brilliant and thoroughly-researched article on presidential attempts to use the bully pulpit.
Conclusion: Perhaps, if Obama had followed the left's Monday-morning quarterback strategy, everything would've come up roses. But debating whether it would've or wouldn't have is itself the problem. What is obvious is that we don't know, and Obama didn't know. He thought hard; he tried his best. He might've gotten it wrong, or the left, even with hindsight, may have it wrong—and there's plenty of evidence for that. Or we may all be wrong. The point is, we really don't know.
And, idle counter-factual speculation is no excuse for turning on your friends. And this, according to Jonathan Chait, is the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives "assail the compromise but continue to praise the man." This is not just good strategy, it morally commendable. Progressives, on the other hand, convict their friends on the basis of unchecked hindsight or theories of how the world should work. I think these are an honest mistake, but they are deadly sins nonetheless. Progressives are simply positive that the one true path (e.g., the right speech) is completely obvious. And since it is, everyone can see it. Hence, anyone who chooses not to follow the true path must be from the dark side. (See Monte Python.)
|[=Krugman]Krugman has his economics right, but for the first couple of years he was extremely naive about his ability to persuade. This is understandable. But, note that Obama did not adopt this naive view, and Krugman has been upset with him ever since for not joining in Krugman's attempt to sell Keynes. Nonetheless, I think Krugman, as an op-ed writer, was right to take on this challenge.
|[=austerity]"I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peacetime in all American history."
|[=stimulus]This stimulus was on top of equally large automatic stimulus—such as unemployment insurance—not present in the 30s.
|[=Roosevelt]My point is <b>not</b> to criticize Roosevelt. He was a great president. But he was not Jesus Christ. He had heart, but he did not have a particularly progressive agenda. He wanted to save capitalism and he did — somewhat accidentally. His economic policies were weak. It was the deficit spending of World War II that saved the economy.
|[=rehabilitated the bankers]The chat concerned only the banking crisis, and he mentions the bankers only once, near the end — "Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was of course not true in the vast majority of our banks but it was true in enough of them to shock the people for a time into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. It was the Government's job to straighten out this situation..."
|[=drastically weakened]Roosevelt had 335 votes to spare in the House and 70 in the Senate, and he gave away the store—just to win his huge bipartisan consensus. If you have any doubt about Obama, here's the comparison.
|[=fireside chat]There were only 8 in his first 4 years.
|[=PopNotes] Just hover over green-underline links above to see the "pop" notes.
Does he cave in to Republicans? Is Obama too bipartisan. He does offer compromise and avoid divisive rhetoric, but there are two possibilities.
Progressives try to figure out which describes the real Obama by listening to his words. And, those don't sound tough, so they think he has no backbone. But what did Teddy say? "Speak softly but carry a big stick." There are two reasons to speak softly, (1) strategy and (2) weakness. Let's look beyond the surface to tell which is at play.
I say, there's a damn good chance—no a certainty—that Obama's bipartisanship is [#strategic], not weak. This doesn't mean he's deceptive. He really does think extremism is a bad thing, and he knows most American's agree. So sincerely trying for bipartisanship is good strategy—most American's are sick of extremism. It's also what Obama believes. But he knows that when the extreme right blocks all progress, his bipartisan stance (his strategy) [#pays off].
I say that's Obama's strategy (more or less), but how can I prove that? Strategies aren't public. It's simple. Compare Obama to Roosevelt, who progressives agree had a backbone and was not too bipartisan.
Both have a signature piece of legislation: [#Social Security] for Roosevelt, and Affordable Health Care for Obama. Who caved in? How do we tell? If you leave a lot of money on the table? You didn't bargain hard—you caved in.
In this case, money is votes. So let's check who left more votes on the table. If you passed the most progressive bill you could, that means that had you pushed any further, you would not have had the votes to pass it. But, if what you care about is bipartisan support, then you'll water down the bill to get as much support as possible from both parties. If you go for weak-kneed bipartisanship, we'll find lots of
money votes left on the table. But not if you've got backbone.
So here's how the two laws went down in Congress
In other words Roosevelt could have had 16 Republicans and 9 Democrats defect in the Senate and still passed Social Security. In other words, Obama left nothing on the table, and Roosevelt left behind a record-breaking number of votes. The House passed it 365 to 30, and the Senate, 76 to 6.
So what didn't Roosevelt have the backbone to fight for? What did he give up by going for all-out bipartisan passage? Most women and minorities were not covered because agricultural, domestic, and government workers, many teachers, and nurses, and hospital, library, and social workers were not covered. On top of that, benefits were paltry (this was later fixed), they were long-delayed in the middle of the depression, and it was financed with a regressive tax.
Obama fought hard and strategically for health care, because he cares about the poor. The conservatives understand this perfectly. Why progressives can't see it is a mystery. But saying Obama has no spine (as my progressive friends say) and holding up Roosevelt for comparison is more than a little unkind. It's delusional. In spite of this, I won't make the mistake they make. Their intentions are are good; they're not closet Republicans, and they haven't gone over to the dark side. They just suffer from that age liberal depression which has dogged Roosevelt and every other Democratic president.
"The greatest fraud this country has ever known. An amusing and charming fellow but a man entirely without a conscience.... Roosevelt was the perfect politician." —H.L. Mencken, The New York Sun, 5 June 1946.
|[=Social Security]The actual votes are available here. Republicans voted for the bill 81 to 15 in the House and 16 to 5 in the Senate. Now, that's bipartisan.
|[=strategic]I'm not saying his strategy always works, or is the right strategy. But there's a big difference between saying your teammate has a bad strategy and saying he's really playing for the other team. No one makes this mistake in sports, business or the military, but in politics and religion people often accuse others on their side of being traitors. This is a terrible mistake.
|[=pays off]Ezra Klein reports data showing that take a public position generally reduces a presidents chances of getting his way.
|[=PopNotes] Just hover over green-underline links above to see the "pop" notes.
Obama inherited and economy in the worst free fall in 80 years. In three weeks he passed a stimulus bill as much as Bush spent on the Iraq war. It may well have prevented a full-scale depression.
Conservatives would have preferred spending cuts, government layoffs and cancellations of private-sector contracts (see US Economy). But this section is about progressive complaints.
Jonathan Chait brilliantly takes on the political reality that the left forgets:
What Krugman really said when the stimulus bill was passed.
Buy the time the House had passed the bill, Krugman appeared to believe, based on his reaction to the Romer-Bernstein graph (below), that with the stimulus, unemployment would peak at around 8% and that by 2012 election, it would be under 6% and heading down fairly quickly. He though Romer was a bit too pessimistic about the effect of the stimulus, but between Jan. 6 and 10th he because more pessimistic then her regarding the peak unemployment without the stimulus. In fact unemployment peaked at 10%.
By JONATHAN CHAIT,
The New York Times, September 2, 2011
This has been the summer that liberal discontent with Obama has finally crystallized. The frustration has been simmering for a while — through centrist appointments, bank bailouts and the defeat of the public option, to name a few examples. But it has taken the debt-ceiling standoff and the threat of a double-dip recession to create a leftist critique of the president that stuck.
Obama's image as a weakling and sellout on domestic issues now centers on his alleged resistance, from the very first days of his presidency, to do whatever was necessary to heal the economy. "The truly decisive move that broke the arc of history," wrote the Emory professor Drew Westen in this newspaper, "was his handling of the stimulus." Just as the conservative repudiation of George W. Bush boiled down to "he spent too much," the liberal repudiation of Obama has settled on "he didn't spend enough."
There's truth in that. President Obama underestimated the depth of the crisis in 2009 and left himself with bad options in the event the economy failed to recover as quickly as he hoped. And yet the wave of criticism from the left over the stimulus is fundamentally flawed: it ignores the real choices Obama faced (and the progressive decisions he made) and wishes away any constraints upon his power.
The most common hallmark of the left's magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president's. Congressional Republicans pursued a strategy of denying Obama support for any major element of his agenda, on the correct assumption that this would make it less popular and help the party win the 2010 elections. Only for roughly four months during Obama's term did Democrats have the 60 Senate votes they needed to overcome a filibuster. Moreover, Republican opposition has proved immune even to persistent and successful attempts by Obama to mobilize public opinion. Americans overwhelmingly favor deficit reduction that includes both spending and taxes and favor higher taxes on the rich in particular. Obama even made a series of crusading speeches on this theme. The result? Nada.
That kind of analysis, however, just feels wrong to liberals, who remember Bush steamrolling his agenda through Congress with no such complaints about obstructionism. Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently invoked "the panoply of domestic legislation — including Bush tax cuts, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Part D prescription drug entitlement — that Bush pushed through Congress in his first term."
Yes, Bush passed his tax cuts — by using a method called reconciliation, which can avoid a filibuster but can be used only on budget issues. On No Child Left Behind and Medicare, he cut deals expanding government, which the right-wing equivalents of Greenwald denounced as a massive sellout. Bush did have one episode where he tried to force through a major domestic reform against a Senate filibuster: his crusade to privatize Social Security. Just as liberals urge Obama to do today, Bush barnstormed the country, pounding his message and pressuring Democrats, whom he cast as obstructionists. The result? Nada, beyond the collapse of Bush's popularity.
Perhaps the oddest feature of the liberal indictment of Obama is its conclusion that Obama should have focused all his political capital on economic recovery. "He could likely have passed many small follow-up stimulative laws in 2009," Jon Walker of the popular blog Firedoglake wrote last month. "Instead, he pivoted away from the economic crisis because he wrongly ignored those who warned the crisis was going to get worse."
It's worth recalling that several weeks before Obama proposed an $800 billion stimulus, House Democrats had floated a $500 billion stimulus. (Oddly, this never resulted in liberals portraying Nancy Pelosi as a congenitally timid right-wing enabler.) At the time, Obama's $800 billion stimulus was seen by Congress, pundits and business leaders — that is to say, just about everybody who mattered — as mind-bogglingly large. News reports invariably described it as "huge," "massive" or other terms suggesting it was unrealistically large, even kind of pornographic. The favored cliché used to describe the reaction in Congress was "sticker shock."
Compounding the problem, Obama proposed his stimulus shortly after the Congressional Budget Office predicted deficits topping a trillion dollars. Even before Obama took office, and for months afterward, "everybody who mattered" insisted that the crisis required Obama to scale back the domestic initiatives he campaigned on, especially health care reform, but also cap-and-trade, financial regulation and so on. Colin Powell, a reliable barometer of elite opinion, warned in July of 2009: "I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president — and I've talked to some of his people about this — is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all. And we can't pay for it all."
Rather than deploy every ounce of his leverage to force moderate Republicans, whose votes he needed, to swallow a larger stimulus than they wanted, Obama clearly husbanded some of his political capital. Why? Because in the position of choosing between the agenda he came into office hoping to enact and the short-term imperative of economic rescue, he picked the former. At the time, this was the course liberals wanted and centrists opposed.
On two subsequent occasions, Obama faced this same choice. Last December, he could have refused to extend any of the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000. Republicans vowed to let all the tax cuts expire if he did so. If Obama let this happen, it would have almost fully solved the long-term deficit problem, while at the same time setting back the recovery by raising taxes on middle-class and low-income workers. Obama decided to make a deal, extending all the Bush tax cuts and also securing a progressive payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment benefits, both forms of stimulus that Republicans would never have allowed without an extension of upper-bracket tax cuts in return.
There is a decent argument that the president should have refused this deal. But if you make that argument, you have to accept the likelihood that nearly a million fewer jobs would have been created and that we would have been at risk of a double-dip recession back then. Yet the liberal critics most exercised about Obama's failure to secure more stimulus were, for the most part, enraged when he did exactly that. Take Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under President Clinton. Last November, Reich pleaded for an extension of unemployment benefits, calling the plight of the jobless our "single newest and biggest social problem." When Obama made his bargain, Reich called it "an abomination," complaining that "the bits and pieces the president got in return" — including the unemployment benefits previously deemed vital — amounted to "peanuts."
And then, this summer, Obama let the G.O.P. hold the debt-ceiling vote hostage to extract spending cuts. I think he should have called the Republicans' bluff and let them accept the risk of a financial meltdown. But the reason Obama chose to cut a deal is that calling their bluff might have resulted in catastrophe. And Obama made a point of back-loading the G.O.P.'s budget cuts so as not to contract the economy. He may have chosen wrongly, but he chose exactly the priorities liberals now insist he ignored — favoring economic recovery over long-term goals.
Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor for The New Republic.
Background Notes on Krugman's critique of the Stimulus
There were sound arguments why the $1.2-trillion figure was too high. First, Emanuel and the legislative-affairs team thought that it would be impossible to move legislation of that size, and dismissed the idea out of hand. Congress was "a big constraint," Axelrod said. "If we asked for $1.2 trillion, it probably would have created such a case of sticker shock that the system would have locked up there."
It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr's remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs's tortured quip that Democrats who've denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation "ought to be drug-tested." Nobody with a sense of history—that is, nobody who reads Starr's book—could doubt how sensible and brave was the president's effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama—and without all the condescending qualifications that "independents," who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt.
Starr, who teaches at Princeton and, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, founded The American Prospect, has written 300-plus pages of tightly woven policy description, narrative and polemic. ... Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons' plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn't come close to being enacted.
Obama's actions were cannier than Clinton's, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a "negative personal impact," but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, "Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks." Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.
Starr's great fear is repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would not only deny healthcare to more than 30 million people but would cast doubt on whether "Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies." Obamacare, in short, was healthcare reform's best—and last—shot, and it would be unconscionable for liberals to remain cavalier about its defense, or Obama's, for that matter. It's past time to discard the misguided assumption that in a better economy, or with more of "a fighter" in the White House, something like a Canadian-style single-payer system might have been (or might sometime fairly soon be) enacted.
The story begins with the Progressive Era, when proposals for government-sponsored healthcare were heavily influenced by, of all things, Otto von Bismarck's sly welfare legacy: the chancellor of Germany had introduced health insurance in 1883 as a way of co-opting proletarian leaders. Soon came the Coolidge-to-Hoover retrenchment. FDR's New Deal never seriously mooted universal healthcare—more on this presently—but the Truman administration did, proposing a single-payer scheme modeled after Social Security. This went down to defeat. ... The Kennedy and Johnson administrations finally delivered Medicare and Medicaid. ...
In retrospect, the saddest chapter was the ridiculously damaging Jimmy Carter–Ted Kennedy fight over universal coverage (Carter opposed it), which roiled Congress and paved the way for Reagan's reactionary "revolution," after which single-payer would never be seriously considered again. Then came the Clintons' letdown, though one triumph was the launch of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (or S-CHIP) in 1997, sponsored by Kennedy and Orrin Hatch. ...
The bottom line for voters, Starr explains, was that healthcare reform became practicable only as a guardian of, well, the bottom line. Premiums kept rising: overall expenditures jumped from about 9 percent of GDP in 1980 to about 14 percent in 1992 and 17 percent today. This frightening increase in the cost of care might seem to suggest an emerging conflict of interest between young and old (though the young worry about their parents, after all). What the increase really created, Starr shows, was a natural alliance in favor of "bending the cost curve" down while keeping the benefits up. Meanwhile, the expansion of "managed care" in Medicaid's network allowed most voters to feel, vaguely and incorrectly, that the indigent would not be abandoned.
A third counterforce is regional lobbying. Starr reminds us at the start of his book that "every dollar spent on health care is also a dollar that someone earns from health care." During the Clinton push, Florida legislators backed away from reform when the insurance industry mounted a TV campaign to convince seniors that Medicare benefits might be cut. And was there ever any point in trying to persuade Joe Lieberman, "the senator from Aetna," to allow people over 55 to buy into Medicare? Nancy Pelosi's staff told Starr that health industry lobbyists from states in which Medicare payment schedules were lowest are the ones who really killed the "public option," because the only conceivable plan of this kind would rely on Medicare to establish rates of compensation, and even Democratic representatives refused to appear to be forcing the short end of the stick on their state's providers. ...
Given that "cost containment" became the game, and esoteric opinions about the numbers qualified one to play it, most voters were easily swayed by the claims and doubts of industry lobbyists presented as experts. Which is why it would have been irresponsible for Obama to try to pass reform without first lining up groups like the AMA, the drug companies and the hospital industry—all of which stood to gain new "customers" under the plan—in order to generate the kind of headlines that imply consensus.
Obama's only real point of disagreement with Hillary, which he eventually conceded, had been about mandating that all citizens—including healthy, employed young people who think they are immortal—buy insurance. Obama had first proposed a mandate only for parents to insure their children; by July 2008 he said simply, "I kind of think Hillary was right," and that was that. (The mandate, of course, was crucial to the act's balance sheet, though it launched the raft of lawsuits that the Supreme Court will begin hearing in March.) Given the history that Starr so lucidly recounts, it's clear that America's healthcare reform was bound to look, at best, more like Switzerland's mixed, complicated system, also based on private sector insurers, than like England's simple, unified one, in which doctors are essentially government employees. Nor, once Obama assumed office, was he going to make the mistake of excluding the heads of key Congressional committees from writing the legislation within the parameters described. If they wrote it, they'd own it. He also succeeded where Bill Clinton had failed, lining up the hospital and drug industries—too discreetly for some critics—in advance of the Congressional push.
Through the summer of 2009, Obama waited for Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Finance Committee—an ally of House Blue Dogs from the conservative state of Montana—to try to bring around Olympia Snowe, one of Maine's two moderate Republican senators. Baucus failed; there is no point rehearsing the sad story Starr tells. But did this mean Obama was deluded by his own rhetoric of bipartisanship and could have gotten a better deal had he been more combative? Not at all. Starr shows that Obama's real goal was "bipartisanship in one party," the not-monolithic Democratic Party. He worked with Blue Dog sympathizers in the Senate like Baucus (and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, etc.) to woo Snowe and the few other Republican moderates, not because he expected to gain Republicans but because he feared losing Democrats. If the reputations of moderate senators did not become inextricably bound with the health reform effort, they'd be able to walk away and face no censure from their voters.
What emerges most vividly from reading Starr is how reckless it was for critics to charge Obama with not making his own views clear enough, or losing control of the narrative, because he resolved to leave to Congress—within an agreed timetable—the work of filling in the details. Yes, the schedule did slip a few months as Baucus worked his committee, but a few months in a century-long effort was a trivial delay. And it would have been widely recognized as such but for the righteous indignation Obama endured during his first spring in office, when anger over the bailouts was white-hot, and his administration's determination to regulate rather than nationalize the banks (remember Tim Geithner's "stress tests"?) gave critics, especially on the left, an opening to depict the president as a creature of Wall Street—catnip for the nascent Tea Party, as it turned out.
Starr shows that when the details of the health legislation finally came out, including proposals to stipulate new Medicare standards of care, talk of "death panels" inflamed latent anxieties about government interfering with personal choices. The left was also incensed by the deal the White House had cut with Big Pharma prohibiting, as part of the legislation, direct negotiations with Medicare over prescription drug prices and excluding medicines imported from Canada. (The industry group PhRMA agreed, in return, to find $80 billion in discounts to Medicare, and to pay for an ad campaign supporting the legislation.) Starr adds that, although this was not publicly known at the time, the health insurance industry wrote an $86.2 million check to the Chamber of Commerce to mount a campaign against the legislation. "If Obama and the Democrats had been in a stronger position politically," he writes, "they could have insisted on stronger cost containment and avoided making as large concessions to PhRMA and the hospitals as they did." But sixty Senate votes meant everything. "Reform needed interest group allies: there would be no way to pass it if the entire health-care industry went into all-out opposition."
* * *
Nevertheless, Obama pushed back hard. He called a press conference for July 22, laid out the elements of the plan as best he could and said of the insurers: "Right now, at the time when everybody's getting hammered, they're making record profits and premiums are going up." Starr—tactful to a fault this time—neglects to add that the real news made at the press conference was Obama's offhand remark that Cambridge police had acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home. The remark was true, but it put Obama on a kind of probation because it gestured toward the incipient gulf between the young, black, brainy president and lunch-pail whites like Sgt. James Crowley (the arresting officer), people who had first backed Hillary and then, like "Joe the Plumber," went in large numbers for John McCain.
Ironically, working-class voters stood to gain much more predictable medical coverage from healthcare reform, because pre-existing conditions and unemployment would no longer interrupt it. But the Gates incident reinforced how hard it would be for Obama to overcome latent suspicions that his healthcare plan was a new kind of affirmative action program or a new bailout for losers, foisted on ordinary people by a patronizing elite shuttling between Harvard Yard and Goldman Sachs. Obama finally stemmed the tide against the bill with a landmark speech to Congress in September, Starr recalls. But much damage had already been done. Months later, the Democratic nominee for Ted Kennedy's seat, Martha Coakley, campaigned ineptly, as if the healthcare proposal pending in the Senate, for which her vote would be crucial, did not exist. The loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat required Obama to hit the road and to embrace a tactical maneuver by which the House simply adopted the Senate bill.
Criticism of the Obama administration gained momentum through 2009, and even became strangely vogue among economists and columnists who were widely thought to be on the president's side. It was in this context that voices who had lionized Obama—from seasoned pragmatists like Robert Reich (who blurbs Starr's book) to MoveOn.org—spoke of the "public option" as the holy grail, and of Obama as its perfidious guardian. Perhaps it was the magical word "public," or the vague sense that Obama, having worked to salvage banks and restructure the car companies, was now protecting the profits of insurance companies. Perhaps it was the way this insinuation was magnified by the charge that the members of Obama's economic team were mostly disciples of Robert Rubin, thus to blame for deregulating investment banking and causing the financial crisis in the first place. Perhaps it was the way Obama's half-heartedness about a public plan, which he knew the Senate would never give him, suggested timidity. In any case, Obama's left critics now lambasted him. Former DNC chair Howard Dean declared in November 2009 that without the public option "this bill is worthless and should be defeated"—not grounds for drug testing, perhaps, but possibly for prescribing some Xanax.
The bill eventually passed, but it had become advantageous on the right, and fashionable on the left, to hold Obama responsible for failing to bring unemployment down to pre-recession levels in just twelve months. ... For the first African-American president, surely the cruelest charge from the left was that in pursuing healthcare the way he did, he had wasted an "FDR moment." ... Indeed, FDR's entire reform strategy depended on holding together a coalition that required him to ignore, if not pander to, the grotesque racism of the South. He got Social Security (and other bills) passed by appealing to immediate and universal pocketbook interests, and with a larger Senate majority, which reserved the filibuster mainly for civil rights; to appease Southern Democrats, he agreed to exclude domestic servants and farm laborers (e.g., sharecroppers) from the initial Social Security program.
Dean supposed that the proposed public option would compete with private insurers on the exchanges and cause the costs of premiums to fall. But would they have? Dean was right that a public option keyed to Medicare rates would have saved the government considerable money—$110 billion over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But, again, states where Medicare payments were low killed the idea. Pelosi was stymied. Without Medicare as the basis, any imaginable public plan would not have been cheaper than private plans.
This last point, of course, is the timely one. Starr is priming us for the 2012 election, ...It would be a shame, Starr warns, if the president who husbanded this once-in-a-lifetime legislation to victory is beaten by a Republican claiming the need for "leadership" in the White House—a double shame if misinformed Democrats, nursing their "disappointment," continue to help make that need seem plausible.
Carol Rosenberg, Foreign Affairs, December 14, 2011
The last two prisoners to leave the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay were dead. ... each was an "indefinite detainee," categorized by the Obama administration's 2009 Guantánamo Review Task Force as someone against whom the United States had no evidence to convict of a war crime but had concluded was too dangerous to let go. Today, this category of detainees makes up 46 of the last 171 captives held at Guantánamo. The only guaranteed route out of Guantánamo these days for a detainee, it seems, is in a body bag.
The responsibility lies not so much with the White House but with Congress, which has thwarted President Barack Obama's plans to close the detention center, which the Bush administration opened on January 11, 2002 with 20 captives.
Congress has used its spending oversight authority both to forbid the White House from financing trials of Guantánamo captives on U.S. soil and to block the acquisition of a state prison in Illinois to hold captives currently held in Cuba who would not be put on trial -- a sort of Guantánamo North. The current defense bill now before Congress not only reinforces these restrictions but moves to mandate military detention for most future al Qaeda cases unless the president signs a waiver. The White House withdrew a veto threat on the eve of likely passage Wednesday, saying the latest language gives the executive enough wiggle room to avoid military custody.
Congress has made it nearly impossible to transfer captives elsewhere. Legislation passed since Obama took office has created a series of roadblocks that mean that only a federal court order or a national security waiver issued by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta could trump Congress and permit the release of a detainee to another country.
Neither is likely: U.S. District Court judges are not ruling in favor of captives in the dozens of unlawful detention suits winding their way from Cuba to the federal court in Washington. And on the occasions when those judges have ruled for detainees, the U.S. Court of Appeals has consistently overruled them in an ever-widening definition of who can be held as an affiliate of al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon's top lawyer, believes that Congress crafted the transfer waivers a year ago in such a way that Panetta (and Robert Gates before him) would be ill-advised to sign them. (In essence, the Secretary of Defense is supposed to guarantee that the detainee would never in the future engage in violence against any American citizen or U.S. interest.)
In a strange twist of history, Congress, through its control of government funds, is now imposing curbs on the very executive powers that the Bush administration invoked to establish the camps at Guantánamo in the first place. Much of its intransigence is driven by the politics of fear: what if, for example, a captive is acquitted in a civilian trial because the judge bars evidence obtained by the military without benefit of counsel? When will another freed Guantánamo detainee attack a U.S. target or interest, such as when Abdullah al Ajami, who was transferred to Kuwait in 2005, blew himself up in a truck bomb attack in Iraq in 2008?
In the face of such public and political pressure -- especially from Congress -- Obama administration officials have waffled at several key moments. For example, Holder changed his mind on where to try five alleged 9/11 plotters at Guantánamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In November 2009, Holder announced that the trial would be held in a civilian courtroom in Manhattan; then, in April 2011, following strong resistance from congressional representatives and New York politicians, the White House abandoned this plan and instead announced that Pentagon prosecutors would bring a trial by military commission.
Resettling in the United States those captives cleared for release has also become taboo. Soon after taking over in 2009, the Obama administration was considering resettling Guantánamo captives from China's Uighur Muslim minority, whom the Bush administration had readied for release. (They were to be hosted by Uighur-Americans in Virginia.) But then, in the face of congressional objections, the White House lost its nerve. The United States instead scattered the Uighurs to Bermuda, Switzerland, and even the Pacific island nation of Palau; five more Uighurs remain at Guantánamo.
Factors besides Congress also contributed to the current Guantánamo stalemate. First, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that at least a fourth of the detainees the United States has released from Guantánamo were confirmed or suspected of later engaging in terrorism or insurgent activity. Opponents of closing Guantánamo immediately seized on these figures. (For its part, the Obama administration noted that most of those on the recidivist list were transferred before Obama took office, when the Bush-era Pentagon approved some 500 releases. Officials took fault with these big-batch transfers and claimed that the Obama administration's individually fashioned, case-by-case system for release would yield better results.)
Second, over the past couple years a powerful al Qaeda offshoot has taken hold in Yemen, the very country where the Obama administration had planned to transfer many detainees. Sending dozens of suspected terrorists back to a country besieged by a growing terrorist threat is hardly good politics or security policy.
Lastly, Obama's executive order to close Guantánamo was undone by the burdensome bureaucracy of the task force, which sought to sort each captive's Bush-era file. Each detainee's case file contained competing and often contradictory assessments from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, the Department of Justice, and myriad other offices, bogging down the review process. Time ran out before the task force could settle on a master plan to move the detainees out of Guantánamo in time for Obama's one-year deadline.
Guantánamo has largely faded from public attention. There is little reason to expect it to emerge as an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign season beyond the usual finger-pointing and slogans: Obama may blame Congress for cornering him into keeping the captives at Guantánamo rather than moving them somewhere else, and his opponents will no doubt argue that, by virtue of his wanting to close the facility in the first place, Obama is soft on terrorism. ("My view is we ought to double it," Mitt Romney said about Guantánamo in a 2007 debate.)
Meanwhile, the detention center enters its eleventh year on January 11. Guantánamo is arguably the most expensive prison camp on earth, with a staff of 1,850 U.S. troops and civilians managing a compound that contains 171 captives, at a cost of $800,000 a year per detainee. Of those 171 prisoners, just six are facing Pentagon tribunals that may start a year from now after pretrial hearings and discovery. Guantánamo today is the place that Obama cannot close.
December 30, 2011. The extreme left hates Obama and will likely end his presidency in favor of a Republican president (predicted, 12/30/2011). Surprisingly, their mistake has been to underestimate the power of corporations and of the extreme right.
December 31, 2011. On a scale of 1=very liberal to 5=very conservative, independents rate Obama at 2.5 compared with themselves at 3.2. They see him as 0.7 too liberal. They rate Romney at 3.4, which is 0.2 too conservative. So now the extreme "left" wants Obama to move further to left, and promises to support him if he does. That's asking him to commit political suicide. They are just not strong enough to undo the damage such a shift would cause. And they have proved that. Unlike the T Party, they have elected almost no one to Congress.
Some reading to understand why the left may cost Obama the election:
12/08/11. Republican strategy against Obama, call him a flip-flopper


text: While watching Spain play Greece I was thinking, Spain's jersey's are kinda cool and I wouldn't mind possibly checking out getting a Rudy Spain jersey. So I looked around online and cannot find Spanish Olympic jerseys on sale anywhere! I even went on their suppliers, Li-Ning's website and found out they don't even have an online store. So I was wondering if anybody else was interested in this like me and if anyone has any insight on this?

subset: commoncrawl


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Zucchini Pickles
Serves 8-12| Hands-On Time: | Total Time:
- 1 1/2 cups rice vinegar
- 2 serrano chilies, halved and seeded (use 1 for milder flavor)
- 1 1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into thirds
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 tablespoon kosher salt
- 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
- 3 medium zucchini, cut into 1/4-inch slices
- In a medium saucepan, combine the vinegar, 1/2 cup water, chilies, ginger, sugar, and salt. Bring to a boil and simmer until the sugar and salt dissolve, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat. Add the red pepper flakes and let sit for 15 minutes.
- Place the zucchini in a large bowl. Pour in the vinegar brine and let sit at room temperature for 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Zucchini pickles can be kept in the refrigerator for 1 week.
Nutritional Information
- Per Serving
- Calories 25Calories From Fat 0%
- Calcium 12mg
- Carbohydrate 6g
- Cholesterol 0mg
- Fat 0g
- Fiber 1g
- Iron 0mg
- Protein 1mg
- Sat Fat 0g
- Sodium 873mg
What does this mean? See Nutrition 101 .
Similar Recipes
Quick Tip
Use a paring knife to cut fruits and vegetables.
Did you try this recipe? How did you like it?
High in vitamin C, these hard, tart berries are grown in bogs in colder regions of North America and Europe. They're almost always eaten cooked, as in the classic Thanksgiving relish.


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Welcome to the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation Media Room. We welcome media inquiries and on-site visits for members of the media who are on assignment from an accredited news, publishing or qualified media outlet. We appreciate advanced noticed so that we can make sure your visit or request is fulfilled with the greatest of care. Thanks for your interest!
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For information regarding the Utah Olympic Oval Solar Project Press Announcement, please click here.
Utah Olympic Park Media Kit
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Park Media Contact
Melanie Welch
P.O. Box 980337
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Office | 435.658.4212
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Office | 801.963.7117


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by Marco Calado
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Panoramic photo by Marco Calado Taken 15:56, 12/07/2009 - Views
The World > Europe > Portugal > Lisbon
View of the so called "Castelejo", located in Castle of Saint Jorge. Its the best well preserved memory of the medieval defensive sistem of Lisbon. Even do it as been reconstructed in several centuries it can be related back to the islamic period.
This view over downtown Lisbon, was taken from Castelejo - Castelo de São Jorge - were a section of t...
Pátio Dom Fradique is located at the southest end of the Castle of Saint Jorge. Its near of one of th...
View from the castle over Lisbon
Urban palace, former property of the Marquis of Ponte de Lima. This is a late nineteenth, early twent...


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May 13, 2014 12:00 am
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We plan for every possible event. Let Dahl Funeral Chapel help with your preplanning needs. Stop in & visit them at 11 Yellowstone Avenue in Billings, MT or on the web


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Moisturising Day Cream has a pleasant, stimulating and unusual aroma and a light liquid consistency that is easily absorbed. It acts to regulate the skin's oil and moisture contents and provides protection while enlivening the natural moisturising processes by stimulating the blood and lymph circulation. This will reinvigorate the pale complexion. This preparation has a subtle and harmonious ingredient blend. Its main constituents are anthyllis extract that balances and helps the skin's regenerative processes; Witch hazel extract has astringent, toning qualities, which stimulate blood circulation and strengthen the capillaries - it also has anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties. Also contained is carrot extract, which is an excellent emollient (softening and soothing properties). Calendula extract has astringent and antiseptic properties that tone and soothe, leaving the skin feeling supple. St. Johns wort extract stimulates new skin growth and has antibacterial properties.
Made in Germany in line with biodynamic philosophy of Dr. Rudolph Steiner.
Water/Aqua, Anthyllis Vulneraria Extract, Prunus Armeniaca (Apricot) Kernel Oil, Alcohol, Hamamelis Virginiana (Witch Hazel) Extract, Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis (Sweet Almond) Oil, Olea Europaea (Olive) Fruit Oil, Daucus Carota Sativa (Carrot) Root Extract, Arachis Hypogaea (Peanut) Oil, Triticum Vulgare (Wheat) Germ Oil, Hypericum Perforatum Extract, Glycerin, Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract, Lecithin, Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil, Fragrance/Parfum*, Limonene, Linalool, Farnesol, Benzyl Benzoate, Geraniol, Citronellol, Citral, Eugenol, Benzyl Salicylate, Algin, Xanthan Gum *purely from essential oils and plant extracts - does not contain synthetic fragrance.
Parabens, Mineral Oil, Synthetic fragrances
Over the last twenty five years, I have tried so many expensive moisturisers: none compare with Moisturising Day Cream. It is a perfect product, smelling delicious, easily absorbed into my combination skin, and effective in providing day-long moisture. - Anonymous, Leeds
Natural Health May 2008: Number 7 of 8 'super-natural heroes' organic products
Use in the morning after cleansing cream and facial toner. Dispense some Moisturising Day Cream into the palm of your hand - a little goes a long way! Gently apply to the face, neck and earlobes, pressing gently until it is absorbed. It is an ideal moisturiser for men as it is absorbed quickly and leaves no oily sheen. Mix with a couple of drops of Translucent Bronze Concentrate for a tinted moisturiser. Moisturising Day Cream, or indeed any of the Dr.Hauschka moisturisers, should not be used at night time as the Dr.Hauschka regime believes that the daily use of night creams can mean that the skin becomes dependant on an external source of moisture rather than producing its own . If you have been using night creams for a long time, then your skin may need extra support in the changeover period to Dr.Hauschka, and in this case, we recommend a course of the Rhythmic Night Conditioner ampoules.


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Disability Law
Lawyer loses ADA appeal in suit claiming she was fired because of insomnia
Posted Apr 9, 2013 10:10 AM CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
An in-house lawyer who claimed she was fired because of an inability to sleep more than four hours a night has lost her federal appeal.
The Richmond, Va.-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against lawyer Victoria Anderson, who had claimed she was fired in 2007 from cable TV company Discovery Communications in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the National Law Journal reports.
In an unpublished opinion (PDF), the 4th Circuit upheld summary judgment for Anderson's employer. A federal court had ruled Anderson did not suffer from a disability when she was fired, citing the opinion of Anderson's own doctors. The trial court had also ruled that even if Anderson's insomnia was a disability, it was not the reason for her firing. Discovery Communications had claimed it fired Anderson because she failed to keep accurate time sheets, she had poor communications skills and she was untruthful with co-workers.
"Discovery articulated a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for Anderson's termination of employment," the appeals court said, "and the record is devoid of evidence that would create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether that explanation was mere pretext."
Anderson did not comment when contacted by the NLJ.
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The Dodging Duck Brewhaus
Ratings: 13 | Reviews: 13 | Display Reviews Only:
3.6/5 rDev -4.5%
A very nice little brewpub in Boerne, about 20 minutes outside of NE San Antonio (Fiesta Texas, UTSA area). Located on River Road near Cibolo Creek, Dodging Duck has a nice outdoor patio as well as seating inside. There are typically four house beers available as well as a nice selection of wine. The beers are available in 4 ounce samplers, half pints and full pints, and can be filled in growlers for take home. The food is nothing too fancy but is pretty good. Definitely place worthy of stopping if you are driving down I-10 and are passing through Boerne.
11-17-2011 04:29:13 | More by Mora2000
3.4/5 rDev -9.8%
Onslow and I stopped by before visiting Freetail in San Antonio. This is a very nice and friendly brewpub. A wood building that is made up of several little rooms with a large deck in front. A very small bar taken up by the regulars and tables scattered about. Homey and worn in. I like it.
They had four beers on tap. A wheat, coffee stout, Irish red, and a winter warmer on nitro. The winter warmer was the winner for me. The others were all kind of bland and watery. Still, all were enjoyable.
We just had some appetizers, which were good but nothing great. I will refrain from judging until I get a chance to have some of the other food items. All seemed simple though. Burgers, sandwiches, and some German sausages were on the menu.
Overall, this is a nice local spot. If I lived in the area, I could see being a regular. Nothing all that special, but solid, simple, and fun. You can't beat sitting out on the large deck right across from the river with a local beer.
03-21-2010 19:16:36 | More by champ103
3.3/5 rDev -12.5%
A) Old house across the street from the river. Small rooms, brew shed out back. It's family friendly, but seemed to sport an older crowd.
Q) Beers were solid, the pumpkin was very good, if a bit heavy on the clove.
S) Bit slow, food took a long time, but the samplers were appreciated.
S) 4 beers on tap, an Alt, Pumpkin, Dunkleish, and an ESB. The pumpkin stood out, the Alt was more of a Blonde, the Dunkle was pleasant but mild, and the ESB was aggressively hopped, but Fuggle forward which isn't to my tastes.
F) Burger was overdone, fries were underdone, kind of disappointing.
Wish I had a place like this in my town, it's well worth a visit.
11-15-2009 07:53:19 | More by HardTarget
New York
3.68/5 rDev -2.4%
Was on vacation in San Antonio and visiting a Dude ranch out in Boerne when we stumbled upon the Dodging Duck Brewhaus.
Wife had a Brewhaus Burger, I had the grilled chicken sandwich. Both sandwiches came on a homemade cheddar jalapeno bun which was superb and really makes the sandwich a step above the rest. We had some of the homemade chips and homemade fries as sides and they were both very good.
As for the beer, I started with the sampler, they were out of one type of beer so they subbed cider. The pumpkin ale was pretty good a little sweet, the dunkleweisen was meh, but the ESB with a west coast twist was pretty good and I settled on a pint of that with my lunch.
Overall we really enjoyed this place, I wish we had somewhere like this in our neck of the woods.
11-07-2009 23:03:33 | More by tdawgydog
4/5 rDev +6.1%
My cousin and I stopped in on Sunday for lunch and a beer. We had been talking about stopping for a year or so and finally managed to think about it as we were driving. We arrived as the place opened and ordered a sampler. Once of the wait staff brought us a bowl of tortilla chips and salsa, explaining that on a Texas Sunday before noon, they could only give us beer with food. The place has a casual atmosphere outside, a bit more formal inside. I had fish and chips, which were excellent. My cousin had pork tenderloin with chimichurri sauce and looked really good, too.
There are only four beers on tap: a honey wheat, Biergesfest Ale (named after the local beer fest coming up), an English bitter (That was excellent. If I could remember the name, I would recommend it hartily! It was perfect with the fish and chips.), and a vanilla porter that was a little short on vanilla and should have been named a coffee porter (It was good, though! Just a let down).
05-27-2008 01:00:39 | More by hiikeeba
3.35/5 rDev -11.1%
On a whim I stopped in at the Dodging Duck for a quick pint and a bite to eat after a morning class at the Cibolo Nature Center just down the road. I'd never heard of the place before, but I noticed it as I was driving to the Center earlier this morning. Figured I owed myself a pint after attending a morning work-related seminar on a saturday.
The Duck is kind of a cool bar/brew pub. It's in an old house, and has a funky feel to it. I sat out on the patio and enjoyed a mild May hill country day. Inside, it had an eclectic, slightly stuffy feel to it, but the patio was quite sociable and commodious. There were about 12-15 tables outside, and the patio was about half full.
The brew pub is situated on River Road, and is right across the street from the Cibolo Creek and River Road Park. It was relatively peaceful, despite the busy street.
The staff was nice and relatively helpful. But they were really young and I'm not sure how knowledgeable they were about beers. There were two snotty homebrew jerks sitting at the table next to me, constantly criticizing every beer they tasted and beckoning to the poor young waitress who was assigned to them that she should go back and tell the brewer that he was doing certain things the wrong way. They weren't just jerks, they were idiots. I wish I could have ignored them, but no such luck. That said, I don't hold their behavior against the brew pub.
I had the Hidden Passage IPA, but they also had a hefeweizen, a wheat, and a vanilla porter on tap. You can get a pint ($4.50) or opt for a sampler flight ($5). I had some mediocre fried green tomatoes (although the cilantro sauce they came with was great), but the menu there is fairly extensive. Lots of sandwiches and pub grub and burgers, but a large salad selection as well.
On the whole, it's not a bad place. I'm eager to give the porter a try on my next visit. A good place to visit if you're in Boerne for the day or just passing through. Good, but not great craft beer.
05-04-2008 03:13:51 | More by Atlas1
3.98/5 rDev +5.6%
Patronized 6-2-06
We made a detour here that was quite out of the way, but I was happy to learn that we could bring our 12# dog with us on the porch, so we stopped here for lunch.
The beers were all quality and well presented. I liked that you could order half-pints so that I could try all four that were on tap without having to wonder if I could continue driving. The beers were all led by the malt in the finish and this was something I really enjoyed as I am a malt-head, not a hop-head.
The food was pretty tasty. The menu wasn't huge, but what they had was pretty good. The price was pretty high for what you got, but I guess the fact that they make their own potato chips gives an excuse to crank the price up a bit...or not. Anyway, it was decent for the price.
The inside is pretty dark and quaint, and looked like a nice place to take your significant other. We stuck to the porch, which gave a nice view of the river going by. I would eat here again if I was a little closer, but I doubt I will drive an hour each way again to go here.
06-11-2006 04:05:35 | More by SkeeterHawk
3.6/5 rDev -4.5%
Vistited the Dodging Duck during a short trip a couple of summers back. Nice little place right alongside the river. Only real downer is that parking is a bit of a challenge. Had the sampler, and would say that they produce 4 very good, but not extraordinary beers. Of the four beers offered, my favorite was the Starducks Espresso Stout. A bowl of tortilla soup was the only food we had time to try, but this was good as well. The people and service were nice & friendly and made us feel very welcome.
03-06-2006 21:15:31 | More by briman
4.33/5 rDev +14.9%
The Dodging Duck Brewhaus is much of what has been stated before. Having that said read the other reviews. They are all perfectly lucid reviews, so, on to my opinion. It is a very charming place. Brewpub, no; a place where you can get good micro beers at a reasonable price, yes! I think that some of the other reviewers have given this place sub par reviews in the food area and I feel that this is not true. But then again, what do I know?
I went there today with a few friends and had an excellent time. The food was great and the beer was good. They were having trouble with one of the beers carbonating (Old Speckled Duck), so they gave us Woodchuck Cider (obviously not their own brew) in its place.I was really disappointed .seeing as how the beer that was out was the one that I was the most interested in trying. Oh well!
So, we did have the Quacker in the Rye Ale. It was a little yeasty and skunky for my tastes and for the tastes of my friends as well. We also had the Dodging Duck Double Chocolate Stout which was delightful. It was very smoky. It seems like it had almost too much of a roasted character to it. I was looking for more of a malty taste to it, but it was still a good beer and everybody else in the group liked it just fine. The Kill your Bill India Pale Lager was my favorite (I had more than my fair share of this one). This beer tasted like an IPA with some Lager yeast (would that be it what makes an IPL?), delicious!
The service was pretty good. The server seemed to be the only one working the whole place, and if that was the case, she did a great job! The food was excellent and there were lots of choices. We had a huge spread of artichoke dip, chorizo nachos, and entrees including bratwurst, knockwurst, and burgers. We ended it all with a delicious brownie and some ice cream. All of the portions of food were more than adequate; everything was great with the foodstuff. Watch out for that tasty mustard ..damn its hot!
02-21-2006 00:33:04 | More by Mitchel
3.88/5 rDev +2.9%
Atmosphere- The Dodging Duck is located in a converted house with brewing equipment located in the back. From the outside this place looked too cute and purposely quaint. A nice patio with a view of the river is located out front, but today was way too cold for outside dining. The inside looked more like a tearoom than a brewpub, I didn't feel this place was decorated with the average brewpub fan in mind. I could be wrong since the other beerfly reviewers enjoyed Dodging's atmosphere.
Quality- All of the four beers I got to taste were very good to great. The dopplebock was very malty and hid the 8% ABV nicely. The ESB was balanced, the porter very fresh with roasted flavor, and the barleywine was very complex.
Service- Very attentive service, plus I heard our waitress talking about taking a growler home for herself so I figure she knows the beer well.
Selection- Only five beers, the 4 I listed earlier and an APA. Since the quality was great this wasn't a problem.
Food- Average tasting and not big enough. Plus their menu didn't have as many choices as most places do.
I totally recommend the beer here, and the food isn't bad. Too bad this place looks like a tearoom.
12-17-2004 02:33:16 | More by Gagnonsux
The Dodging Duck Brewhaus in Boerne, TX
87 out of 100 based on 13 ratings.


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Region 15 schools are closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 1 and 2.
School officials will make a decision on whether schools will be open or closed on Thursday, November 3, at a later time.
Region 15 staff remind residents that Pomperaug High School, 234 Judd Rd., Southbury, is available as a 24/7 shelter. No pets are allowed. Showers are available.
Residents are asked to bring bottled water and snacks, as MREs, or meals-ready-to-eat, are not available at the high school at this time.


text:
With help from hundreds of volunteers, the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Illinois has granted more than 9,000 wishes for children who face catastrophic illnesses.
The first annual 5K for Wishes later this month will help the foundation continue making dreams come true.
Tiffany Eccles speaks about the event coming up on Saturday, August 21 at the Shoppes at Grand Prairie.
Registration is open online at www.5kforwishes.org.
Or you can register the day of starting at 6:30 a.m.at the Shoppes at Grand Prairie.
5K registration fee is $25 (pre-event) and day of event registration is $30.
The cost for the 200m Dash for Kids is $10, (pre-event) and day of event registration is $13.


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So, Dave Shoalts has this article in the Globe and Mail. If we leave aside the headline, which he probably didn't write, I still think it is fair to summarize his overall point as the following argument is not true:
There's a funny thing about the NHL – despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are still plenty of people who argue that finding a goaltender doesn't need to be at the top of every general manager's to-do list.
Put together a great team, they say, and a good but not great goaltender will do. Don't waste a first-round draft pick on a goaltender. You can get a decent one in a trade any old time.
Surely with a thesis like that he will have "overwhelming evidence" that a team ought to go out and acquire a top-flight goaltender. Let's take a look after the jump.
Shoalt's first piece of evidence - Martin Brodeur is leading the charge back to the playoffs for New Jersey.
Now, leave aside last night's game in Calgary, that wouldn't be fair. Surely Brodeur's other stats show that he is all but single handedly carrying New Jersey into the playoffs. Except his save percentage is 0.891 (except as linked to below, all stats courtesy of NHL.com). Amongst goalies that have played at least 10 games this season (53 goalies), he is the second worst in the league. Only fellow aged wonder Dwayne Roloson has a worse save percentage. Andrew Raycroft has a better save percentage. Even the other goalie in New Jersey, Johan Hedberg, has a better save percentage at .907.
Perhaps Brodeur has been unlucky on the penalty kill and is really killing it at EV? Nope. His .896 EV save percentage does now put him ahead of Alex Auld and Dwayne Roloson and tied with Steve Mason for goalies with 10 games played . Still behind Hedberg at .908.
Why, it is almost as if something else is accounting for New Jersey's turn around from last year. Couldn't be that their shooting percentage has gone to 9.32% from 7.27% last year. Or that they are a good possession team with the 9th best score tied Fenwick percentage. Nope, it is the importance of having an overpaid, aging goaltender on the roster.
Shoallt's second piece of evidence - The emergence of good goaltending from James Reimer and Jonas Gustavsson in Toronto.
First, neither one of these guys is anything other than what the proponents of not spending money and draft picks on goaltending would hold up as the best use of resources on goaltending: middling to low paid goalies acquired without burning high draft picks. Gustavsson is a European free agent signing. Reimer is a 4th round pick, 99th overall. So apparently it is possible to get good goaltending from unlikely sources.
Second, these guys have been no fresh hell overall. Gustavsson's overall save percentage is .908 and .917 at EV. That's not bad, but not exactly a world beater. Reimer's overall save percentage is .900 but his EV save percentage is .935. That's good for a tie for 5th amongst goalies with 10 games played. Certainly a part of the reason Toronto is doing better this season. Although, again, he only has a $1.8 million cap hit (salary info here and below from capgeek.com) and was a 4th round draft pick. Hardly a big allotment of resources, but the results(ish) still are there for Toronto.
Shoalt's third piece of evidence - Ryan Miller now sucks
Why, it is almost as if the point he was trying to prove that spending a lot of money on a goaltender that was good is no assurance that goaltender will be good in the future! Miller has the third highest cap hit amongst goaltenders in the NHL. A contract that was signed after Miller posted a career best save percentage of .918, above his prior career average save percentage (over 7686 shots) was .910. His career save percentage since he signed that contract? .919 - or about league average. One would almost think that it is difficult to predict which goalies are going to perform at a markedly higher level than league average over time, making it a bad idea to allocate lots of cap space to them.
Shoalt's fourth piece of evidence - Montreal had two great goaltenders, but had to trade one away and didn't get enough in return. And now Brian Elliott is awesome anyways.
I don't even really know where to start with this one. First, he seems to think Carey Price and Jaroslav Halak were both potential Hall of Famers after the 2009-10 season. You know, when Halak had 101 games under his belt and Price had 134.
Notwithstanding that Montreal supposedly has this tremendous goaltender in Price, they still suck this year (with Price's save percentage of .913 right around his career average of .916).
And in St. Louis, despite going out and securing this Hall of Fame candidate goaltender in Halak with a contract at a $3.75 million cap hit (16th in the league this season amongst goaltenders), they missed the playoffs last year. This year they are in the playoff picture as of today. Surely, given the importance of securing good goaltending, it must be because their big Hall of Fame candidate goaltender has come through? Er, no. Their career journeyman (9th round pick, 3 teams in six seasons) back up with a cap-hit of $600,000 has been one of the best goaltenders in the league with a .940 save percentage. A player acquired at a low salary without burning high draft picks or player assets.
I haven't even covered the number of other cases Shoalts ignores where teams have spent big on goaltending only to come up with pretty much nothing. (I will just put: Philadelphia and Bryzgalov! Chicago and Cristobal Huet!)
Again, it is almost as if the proposition that Shoalts attempts to disprove, it is very difficult to predict which goaltenders would have great seasons, so teams are better off to allocate few assets to the position, is demonstrated by his own examples.


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United We Stand
Click on Images Below
B&W Portfolios
Color Portfolios
I have been photographing
the landscape for the past
25 years, mostly in "black &
white". I have added a portfolio of duotone images
from Spain to the B&W portfolios. Since these images are still
"mono-chromatic", I group them with the Black and White images.
I have a total of nine B&W portfolios on this website, arranged by
location, mostly from US national parks.
I also have
ten color portfolios to this website, one of which is quite different from the traditional landscape photography. The color
portfolios include traditional landscapes as well as enhanced or different
looking color images.
The first of the
non-traditional color portfolios I call "Florascapes".
images are derived from photographs of flowers, but
digitally morphed into images I see
as landscapes. I use Photoshop CS2, and
a lot of imagination, to create these images.
second type of non-traditional color portfolios contains images in a "Photo-Impressionistic" style.
Some say they look like watercolor paintings, others think they look more
like pen-and-ink drawings. The digital process I use allows for more creativity then a straight
photographic reproduction would, much as a painter
alters an image he paints.
All the images
you find here are available for sale to you directly from this website, so
please contact me below. Pricing can be found by
clicking the "Ordering" button.
Do you have any comments about this website or
the images? I would love to hear from you! Please contact me at: email@example.com
This website is
This website was written using Microsoft Frontpage 2000, and has been optimized for use with Netscape Navigator
or Internet
Explorer web browsers, and an 800 x 600 pixel 17" display.


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Ohhhh, girl, it's time for the second shift. Clemson's looking to score an eight ball and rage against North Carolina, whose coach is most definitely
not fired pumped for this game! Jerry Jones is watching his Razorbacks from his sex-plane circling the JerryDome! INSIDER TIP: He's drunk and still wealthy! Dave Wannstedt leads Pitt against Notre Dame, and the floating head of Tom Hammond approves of this opportunity to narrate long, feeble field goal attempts! Michigan plays Michigan State in Mark Dantonio's first game back after his HNNNNNNNNNNNG----


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- What is PlayMoolah?
- What is the PlayMoolah OCBC Promotion?
- Can I use PlayMoolah if I'm not an OCBC Customer?
- What is in the full version of PlayMoolah?
- How can I get the full version of PlayMoolah?
- How do I use PlayMoolah?
- How do I sign up with my promo code from OCBC?
- I already have a PlayMoolah account. How do I redeem my promo code?
- How do I use the parents' dashboard?
- How do I set a savings goal?
Q: What is PlayMoolah?
A: PlayMoolah is a fun online platform that helps children achieve financial savvy and practice good money management skills in a fun, engaging, and safe manner. As children learn best through a mix of both play and real-world experience, the PlayMoolah platform offers a range of features that encourage children to make real financial decisions and take action, using both virtual and real-world dollars. Parents have a dashboard where they can keep updated with their child's learning, and get involved with their child's financial journey.
Q: What is the OCBC PlayMoolah Promotion?
A: OCBC is offering PlayMoolah FREE to Mighty SaversTM customers!
- With a minimum deposit of S$50 into an OCBC Mighty SaversTM account, you gain access to PlayMoolah Lite (this has fewer features than the full version). There will be new features to unlock every month!
- With a deposit of S$1,000 or more, you gain access to the full version of PlayMoolah for 6 months.
To find out more about OCBC Mighty SaversTM programme and how to get a free PlayMoolah full version account, visit http://www.ocbc.com/mightysavers.
Q: Can I use PlayMoolah if I'm not an OCBC Customer?
A: Yes, non-OCBC customers can sign-up for a 7-day free trial or purchase a full version of PlayMoolah.
Q: What is in the full version of PlayMoolah?
A: A full version of PlayMoolah gives you a membership that unlocks all the benefits for kids to learn more, do more, and have more fun! Members get more games (e.g. more cool jobs!), over 100+ questions to hone numeracy and money savvy skills, and set unlimited goals. The full version also gives parents a dashboard where they can stay updated and participate in their child's learning. PlayMoolah offers great tools and fun family project ideas to inspire teachable moments at home. For more information, visit our Membership page.
Q: How can I get the full version of PlayMoolah?
A: There are two ways to get a full version of PlayMoolah
- You can purchase a PlayMoolah Membership for as little as $6.90 for one month.
- If you are a OCBC Mighty SaversTM customer, you can gain access to the full version of PlayMoolah by depositing a minimum of S$1,000.
Q: How do I use PlayMoolah?
A: Simply sign up for a new account, or log in with your existing account.
Q; How do I sign up with my promo code?
A: When you sign up for an account, you will be asked for a secret code. Enter the promo code on your OCBC-PlayMoolah collectible card.
Q: I already have a PlayMoolah account. How do I redeem a promo code within the game?
A: After you log in, click on King Mooman's Pot of Presents at the bottom right corner of the planet map screen. Enter your promo code on your OCBC-PlayMoolah collectible card to redeem your reward!
Q: How do I use the parents' dashboard?
A: The parents dashboard comes with a full PlayMoolah Membership. You will get an email with a link to sign up for your very own parents' account that is paired with your child. From there, your home screen would show a summary of your child's learning and activity, and you can navigate the tabs above how he is earning, spending, saving, investing, and giving his money.
Q: How do I set a savings goal?
A: After you log in, click on the Goal Machine icon. Select 'Savings Goal' and start by entering the name of the item you want.
Q: Help! I got an error message when I try to sign up!
A: There are two common reasons for the error
- Are you on an iphone, ipad, or ipod touch device? Try again on a laptop, computer, or device with a browser that supports Adobe Flash Player.
- Do you have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player? PlayMoolah runs on the latest version of Adobe Flash Player 11.
If you are still having problems, please email email@example.com and we'll be happy to help!
Q: My promo code is not working!
A: If your promo code does not seem to work and you are getting an error message, please go down to any OCBC branch and we are happy to do a 1-to-1 exchange for a new PlayMoolah code.


text:
November 28, 2005
Albany -- Albany's murder rate nearly doubled from last year. Now County Commission Chairman Jeff Sinyard says he's sick of thugs running the city, and he wants the citizens to take back control.
Home invasions, armed robberies, shootings and even murder, life in the Good life city, isn't so good. "I don't care if you're in the South, East or West in Dougherty County, homes and business are being broken into. My business has been broken into. I've been violated and it's terrible," Sinyard says.
Chairman Sinyard says the violent crime must come to an end. "I guarantee you if we start protecting the citizens, you'll find that the thugs start going somewhere else to do their crimes. They'll realize that they can't walk in with a gun, and that you're just going to leave and go away and that they can get what they want and get away with it."
He says laws need to be on the books that will allow people to defend themselves or their loved ones, without being sued or prosecuted. "I'm talking about some meaningful sustained law that would allow citizens to have protection against prosecution for those engaged in a violent crime with a gun."
Chief Assistant District Attorney Greg Edwards says there are laws that allow citizens to take action. "There are two aspects of self defense. There's crime prevention defense, and just traditional defense."
Crime prevention defense allows a person to use what reasonable force is necessary to prevent a forcible felony. "For instance if a person is being car jacked, that would be a forcible felony and a person would be able to use reasonable force to prevent a felony."
Traditional self defense, anyone is able to defend themselves or another person against great bodily injury. "The bottom line is that you can prevent a forcible felony being perpetrated against you or your family member, or to protect your home or family."
But the law isn't cut and dry. Edwards says you should proactive in keeping your family safe, and only react when you absolutely must.
So far this year, there have been nine murders in Albany. Last year, there were five.
Feedback: email@example.com?subject=CrimeRate
P.O. Box 3130
Albany, GA 31706
(229) 446-1010
FCC Public File
(229) 446-4005
EEO Report
Closed Captioning


text:
Sometimes it seems that the idea of selling just spreads along a street.
Last year, one standout was Rosecrans. This year, it's Wendy Way with a selling outbreak. (See "Wendy Keeps Running.")
With the new listing this week at 747 33rd (5br/5ba, 3800 sq. ft.), it feels like 33rd St. in the Tree Section is turning over at a good clip, too.
With a total of 6 listings/sales so far this year, these little 3 blocks west of Pacific might well give Wendy Way a run for its money when the final stats are compiled for 2014.
The "Santa Barbara" Spanish at 747 33rd is asking $2.875M, but it's hardly the priciest on the street.
You might look to 742 33rd (5br/6ba, 3975 sq. ft.), a Cape Cod with bonus square footage in the basement. That one came out at $2.998M in…


text:
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£43,000 in unpaid tax will not be collected (From Worcester News)
Get involved! Send your photos, video, news & views by texting WN NEWS to 80360 or e-mail us
£43,000 in unpaid tax will not be collected
8:40pm Friday 14th December 2012 in News By Tom Edwards, Political Reporter
MORE than £43,000 of unpaid council tax and business rates has been "written off" in only three months, it has emerged.
New data has been published by Worcester City Council based on collection performance between July and September this year.
About £12,000 of it came from the collapse of two business rate accounts from unnamed companies, one of which went bust while the other vanished without trace – known as "absconding".
The write-off means all the relevant bodies which benefit from taxes and business rates take a hit on their balance sheets – including the city council, fire and police services, and County Hall.
A report on the move says written records on each write-off are kept on a database and can be reinstated if any new details come to light which enable the debts to be chased.
Reasons for people not paying council tax can vary, but it can include residents moving away, people dying, and those who refuse to pay, who are liable for prosecution.
Councillor Andy Roberts, the city council cabinet member for finance, said: "It's always worth saying these cases are not forgotten about, and if new information comes to light we will pursue them.
"These are not just Worcester City Council's debts, but those of the council tax preceptors across the county."
The revenues and benefits department, a shared service across south Worcestershire, has written off 68 different cases, totalling £31,000 of that money.
The remaining £12,000, which has been written off by the city council, applies to the two firms which went bust or vanished.
In the previous two financial years more than £1 million has been written off – £297,000 in 2011/12 and £760,000 in 2010/11 when bosses decided to lump a list of historic unpaid taxes together.
About 98 per cent of the taxes owed to the council was collected last year, a small improvement on 2010/11.
Overall, £48 million was handed over in council taxes and £37 million in business rates.
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text:
maggie fay
Volunteer: maggie fay
I'm currently a secondary education volunteer at an Islamic Senior High School in East Java, Indonesia.
Contributions from maggie fay
15 Years From Now...
Another Sunday morning expedition on foot with Bu S, this time to the local landfill. I had run by it once when I first arrived here, not yet aware of the taboo of unaccompanied female joggers. Bu S suggested it as an interesting place to visit and a chance to meet people whose paths I might not otherwise cross. A beautiful vegetable garden immediately welcomed us after we entered, and just a few steps further were the composting silos. Two rows of five white buildings whose sole pu...
A Wave of Prayer
morning prayer at the islamic high school where i teach, just before sacrificing 2 cows in our school yard. later that day, the students distributed the meat to the poor. eid al-adha is celebrated around the world by muslims to commemorate abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son. as a non-muslim, i watched from behind with the girls who were menstruating and therefore could not participate.
Javanese Bride-to-Be
The hours long preperation before the traditional marriage ceremony- no less than three people were working on her at any given time.


text:
Meta T. Dust wrote: »The honor and privilege of buying me a train ticket to seattle and paying for my admission to pax.
Neville, I'd like to submit that video I sent you of me jerking off as my entry for this. And if you hated that I have a good present in mind.
Bendery It Like Beckham wrote: »
Viscount Islands wrote: »
Metalbourne wrote: »Jormungandr? Damn near killed 'er!
Nevs, Dru and I went to the Ballard market yesterday before I left town and I just had magical images of us selling sweet things in one of their booths
Metalbourne wrote: »Jormungandr? Damn near killed 'er!
Skayel wrote:One time, I had a friend over to play a bit of Red Alert on my LAN. During the game he said he needed to go to the bathroom, so we paused it. After about 10 minutes of wondering where the hell he went, I get up and go to check on him.
Turns out he was trying to screw my dog.
pinenut_canary wrote: »Once I was taking a poop at a restaurant and a kid crept underneath the door into my stall. I let out a big fart and then he threw up all over the floor in front of me and I just stared at him.


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Me: A Short Autobiography
Hi! Patch here. Thank you for taking the time to visit this website and for your curiosity concerning my work. You may have heard of me through the film about my life in medical school, Patch Adams, and I can confirm that I am actually a real person. I am a Doctor, but above all else I consider myself an activist for peace, justice and care for all people. Please read my short autobiography below to learn a little more and if it's interesting, consider purchasing my book, Gesundheit!. Have fun! -
My older brother and I were World War II babies. Dads career was in the army and he fought all of World War II and Korea. We grew up on army bases, outside the US during peacetime and stateside during wartime. Our last seven years with him were in Germany where he died in 1961. He was so damaged by his war experiences that he couldn't connect with me. I had no father. My mother was remarkable. She loved us. She was a schoolteacher and fed me all of my interests, giving me self-esteem and making me a creative, loving man who cared for people. Read More ⇓
First, I wanted to go out and engage the world as this happy soul. I started clowning in public and have done it daily since. Second, I set out to quench my thirst for knowledge by studying everything I could get my hands on. In order to become an instrument for peace, justice and care I read thousands of books. I needed to understand so I could create solutions. I became interested in whole systems thinking, looking for ways to integrate it with the hospital-community concepts that emerged in medical school. In my imagination I envisioned a communal eco-village hospital that would address every problem of the way healthcare was delivered in one model. I wrote it up in a paper in March, 1971 and this was the basis of what became the Gesundheit Institute. Read More ⇓
In the last 28 years, I´ve created 50 presentations and performed them in 70 countries. I´ve spoken at 90 medical schools in the US and many more around the world. Over the course of the last two decades I´ve been on the road for 200-300 days of the year.
In 1985, I took a group of people on a clown trip to what was then the Soviet Union. Equipped with colorful clothing and compassion we visited hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly as well as just clowning on the street. Since then, these trips have been an integral part of Gesundheit´s global outreach. Apart from returning to Russia every year there have been clown trips to all corners of the world, including visits to war zones, refugee camps and natural disaster sites. We´ve also built clinics and a school at some of the places we´ve visited. I go on six or seven of these trips yearly. They are the sweetest healing work I get to do while I wait for the hospital. Read More ⇓
In the summer of 2011 we started construction of our first big building, a Teaching Center & Clinic in West Virginia. This will allow us to see patients once again as well as providing a space to teach health care system design. In the excitement for this moment, I chose to move to Urbana, Illinois to live with my beloved Susan, who has been and continues to be a precise mentor to me. In recent years I've had the opportunity to work together with my sons and brother, Wildman, and life doesn't get any better than that. All this in hopeful preparation for the dream of a crazy free hospital. My life has been a dance with humanity. Friends are my passion.


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In it, but not of it. TPM DC
Stern: It's Time For The Ineffectual Senate To Pass This Health Care Bill
Without mentioning the public option specifically, Stern said that Obama needs to take a hard line in negotiations between the House and the Senate, "to work with the conferees on the issues that he has said from the very beginning are important to him."
He did say, though, that the prospects for a public option or a Medicare buy-in seem pretty dim. "It's hard to imagine it getting it better in conference," he said.
Stern added that the clumsy, year-long fight over health care in the Senate needs to serve as a wake up call to elected officials that the upper chamber is broken.
"After this bill is passed," Stern said, "the Senate needs to take a very hard look at how it's going to deal with the future in our country."
"They have a process now that is not meeting the needs of the American people."
And what if, in conference, Stern's chief concerns (affordability, access, the financing mechanism in the Senate bill) are not addressed? It's far from clear that he'll break ranks with the Democratic party.
"There are lots of parts of the Senate bill that are really good," he said.