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n2doc's JournalToles- Romney’s concession speech
By Tom Toles
Everybody is saying that the race is tightening, or dead even or toss-up, or that the momentum is all Romney’s, but I’m sorry, I’m not buying it. Maybe it’s true, November 7th is soon enough to adjust my position, if necessary. Around here, Obama has already been re-elected, and we’re comfortable with that.
Obama won the debates. All of them. Yes even the first one. His “performance” may have been excessively “coma-like” but there was Romney proposing a completely nonsensical budget. Now tell me how you can propose something that is completely nonsensical, and be declared the “winner.” If that’s true, debates are meaningless and why do we have them at all then? Good question! If they were as important as everybody said, Obama won most of them by anybody’s count, and so should be re-elected. And here in this Blog, he already has been. So I’m going to jump ahead one more step and write a brief Romney concession speech.
“My fellow, Americans, it has been a hard-fought campaign, but the people have spoken, and we shall go forward together as one nation under our re-elected president. I guess some of the things I said about him aren’t really true, like how ALL his policies were wrong, including the ones I agreed with. And yes I eagerly climbed atop a party that has tried for four years to de-legitimize a sitting president with a collection of tactics and fabrications and I was only to happy to ride it. Suffice it to say that my position now has changed, again, to ‘never mind’. Let’s support the president, NOW. Yes I helped to widen the terrible political chasm that has opened in this country. Damage done. But I’m not going to say I’m sorry, because that would be an apology tour.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/romneys-concession-speech/2012/10/23/dca580b6-1d31-11e2-b647-bb1668e64058_blog.html
NYT-Obama’s Early Voting Advantage
By DAVID FIRESTONE
CLEVELAND – Having shouted himself hoarse for two days urging supporters to vote, and vote early, President Obama flew to Chicago to do so himself this afternoon, on his way to an evening rally here in Ohio. His campaign says he is the first sitting president to vote for himself ahead of Election Day.
In casting his ballot early, Mr. Obama is providing a very personal endorsement of a system that was enormously successful for him in 2008, and may be the key to his re-election hopes. His narrow win in North Carolina four years ago was driven in large part by early voters, who turned out in larger numbers than those on Election Day, and tended to support Mr. Obama. They also gave him a winning margin in Iowa, Florida and Colorado.
Early voting is popular among those with inflexible work or transportation schedules, who often tend to be lower-income, elderly, or minority voters and are thus more likely to be Democrats. In North Carolina four years ago, more than half the black vote was cast before Election Day, compared to 40 percent of the white vote. In many states, black voters went directly to the polls from church on the Sunday before Election Day.
...
While Republicans fought against the tide, the Obama campaign built an early-voting juggernaut. Volunteers have worked for months to identify voters most likely to use the system, offering them encouragement, instruction and transportation. The campaign estimates that 40 percent of the country’s votes will be cast before Nov. 6, compared to about 31 percent last time, and a Time Magazine poll out this week said the president has won 60 percent of the early votes so far in Ohio.
rest of article
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/obamas-early-voting-advantage/
THE AVENGING UTERUS ON RICHARD MOURDOCK
http://www.mattbors.com/blog/2012/10/24/the-avenging-uterus-on-richard-mourdock/
How processed beef trimmings got rebranded, again and again and again.
By Daniel Engber|
Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012, at 3:48 AM ET
What do you call a mash of beef trimmings that have been chopped and then spun in a centrifuge to remove the fatty bits and gristle? According to the government and to the company that invented the process, you call it lean finely textured beef. But to the natural-food crusaders who would have the stuff removed from the nation's hamburgers and tacos, the protein-rich product goes by another, more disturbing name: Pink slime.
The story of this activist rebranding—from lean finely textured beef to pink slime—reveals just how much these labels matter. It was the latter phrase that, for example, birthed the great ground-beef scare of 2012. In early March, journalists at both the Daily and at ABC began reporting on a burger panic: Lax rules from the U.S. Department of Agriculture allowed producers to fill their ground-beef packs with a slimy, noxious byproduct—a mush the reporters called unsanitary and without much value as a food. Coverage linked back to a New York Times story from 2009 in which the words pink slime had appeared in public for the first time in a quote from an email written by a USDA microbiologist who was frustrated at a decision to leave the additive off labels for ground meat.
The slimy terror spread in the weeks that followed. Less than a month after ABC’s initial reports, almost a quarter million people had signed a petition to get pink slime out of public school cafeterias. Supermarket chains stopped selling burger meat that contained it—all because of a shift from four matter-of-fact words to two visceral ones.
And now that rebranding has become the basis for a 263-page lawsuit. Last month, Beef Products Inc., the first and principal producer of lean/pink/textured/slimy beef, filed a defamation claim against ABC (along with that microbiologist and a former USDA inspector) in a South Dakota court. The company says the network carried out a malicious and dishonest campaign to discredit its ground-beef additive and that this work had grievous consequences. When ABC began its coverage, Beef Products Inc. was selling 5 million pounds of slime/beef/whatever every week. Then three of its four plants were forced to close, and production dropped to 1.6 million pounds. A weekly profit of $2.3 million had turned into a $583,000 weekly loss.
more
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/food/2012/10/history_of_pink_slime_how_partially_defatted_chopped_beef_got_rebranded.html
Fish shoots down prey with super-powered jet
Katherine Harmon
25 October 2012
With a juicy insect dinner perched on a leaf above the water, what is a hungry little archer fish down below to do? Knock it down with a super-powered, super-precise jet of water that packs six times the power the fish could generate with its own muscles, according to new findings published online October 24 in PLoS ONE.
The stunning spitting power of the amazing archer fish (Toxotes jaculatrix) was first described in the 18th century. The creature lives in mostly in mangrove forests and estuaries where insects are prevalent—above water, that is. And these tasty treats are not easily knocked off of the plants that hang over the archer fish’s territory. The insects, such as grasshoppers, can hang on with a force some 10 times their own body weight.
So the archer fish has developed an impressive strategy for fetching food that not many other fish can reach. Its water jet can target and dislodge a single insect so that it falls into the water for the fish to eat.
Just how the fish manages to do this—and in less than a second—had remained a mystery. Many scientists figured that the source must be a special organ in the fish’s body. “The origin of the effectiveness of the jet squirted by the archer fish has been searched for inside of the fish for nearly 250 years,” Alberto Vailati, a physicist at the University of Milan and co-author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement.
more
http://www.nature.com/news/fish-shoots-down-prey-with-super-powered-jet-1.11668
How to eat a Triceratops
Tyrannosaurus tore the head off armoured prey to reach the tender neck meat.
Matt Kaplan
24 October 2012
Theirs was the immortal battle: a fierce tyrant battling a defender armed with three lethal horns and protected by a bony frill around its neck. Yet the violent fight between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops is hardly the stuff of Hollywood hype. Tyrannosaurus bite marks are well known on the fossil bones of Triceratops but, so far, such fossils have always been studied in an isolated manner.
In a departure from this precedent, work presented last week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, reports on an examination of numerous bite-scarred Triceratops bones and a theory of how Tyrannosaurus fed.
Denver Fowler at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and his colleagues studied numerous Triceratops specimens from Montana's Hell Creek Formation to identify how many had the characteristic tooth marks of Tyrannosaurus on them. They found 18, most of which were skulls. When they looked closer, they noted something important: none of the bones showed any signs of healing, indicating that the bites were inflicted on dead animals that were in the process of being eaten.
more
http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-eat-a-triceratops-1.11650
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