Main Street in Revolt

The homemade sign for Mitt Romney in the yard of a well-manicured but modest home in Leadville, Colo., forlornly signals the fracture of another onetime supporter of Barack Obama.

If Romney wins the presidency on Tuesday, the national media, the Washington establishment and the bulk of academia will have missed something huge that happened in “flyover” America under their watch.

It is a story that few have told.

It reminds one of the famous quip by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael following Richard Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.”

Two years after suffering a historic shellacking in the 2010 midterm election, Democrats astonishingly have ignored Main Street Americans’ unhappiness.

That 2010 ejection from the U.S. House, and from state legislatures and governors’ offices across the country, didn’t happen inside the Washington Beltway world.

It didn’t reflect the Democrats’ or the media’s conventional wisdom or voter-turnout models. So it just wasn’t part of their reality.

In Democrats’ minds, it was never a question of “How did we lose Main Street?” Instead, it was the fault of the “tea party” or of crazy right-wing Republicans.

Yet in interview after interview — in Colorado, along Nebraska’s plains, in small Iowa towns or Wisconsin shops, outside closed Ohio steel plants and elsewhere — many Democrats have told me they are furious with the president. Not in a frothing-at-the-mouth or racist way, as many elites suggest. They just have legitimate concerns affecting their lives.

These Main Street Democrats in seven battleground states supported Obama in 2008. Now they are disappointed by his broken pledges: Where is the promised bipartisanship? How could health-care reform become such a mess? What direction is the country going in?

Via: Real Clear Politics

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Massachusetts Congressional Race 6th District: Gambling question torches Tierney-Tisei debate

John Tierney

Richard Tisei

NEWTON — It took mere seconds of airtime for moderator Jim Braude of NECN to ask about the gambling scandal plaguing Congressman, and the gloves were tossed to the mat Thursday night in a primetime television debate.

Republican opponent Richard Tisei pounced on the question — the first asked directly about Tierney’s family in four debates to date.

“He said he had no knowledge of what was going on, but both of his brothers-in-law contradicted him and said he did know what was going on,” Tisei said, referring to the multimillion-dollar offshore gambling scheme that Tierney’s brothers-in-law were running in Antigua.

Tisei then hammered the congressman on his trip to Antigua to visit brother-in-law Robert Eremian, “in the middle of the gambling operation,” as well as the reported $220,000 in gifts the congressman’s wife, Patrice Tierney, received from her now-fugitive brother when she managed a multimillion-dollar account for him in Salem.

“I do think there should be a congressional investigation,” Tisei said when asked if Tierney did anything illegal.

The congressman, who has been hounded by the scandal since his wife was charged with filing faulty tax returns for her brother in 2010, responded sternly.

“My two brothers-in-law didn’t say that, when the (Boston) Globe went down to visit my brother-in-law down there, he had nothing to offer them in terms of that,” Tierney said. When confronted that one of his brothers in-law, Daniel Eremian, told a Salem News reporter that Tierney “knew everything” about the operation, the congressman replied, “You can take his word, or you can take mine.”

As he has throughout the campaign, Tierney noted that the judge in his wife’s case — in which she pleaded guilty to being “willfully blind” to the true nature of her brother’s operation — indicated at one point that Tierney is “‘not implicated in any way, shape or form,’ and he’s right on this,” Tierney said.

Tisei challenged that claim, saying that Judge William Young “never cleared you of anything.”

“Judge Young said the congressman has nothing to do with this, meaning the sentencing hearing,” Tisei said. “He wasn’t looking at the whole thing.” He noted several news organizations who have called Tierney’s use of the judge’s quote “misleading.”

Tierney again went on the offensive.

“Misleading? Richard, you have lied and used insinuation and innuendo on this whole thing and spent $3 million doing it,” Tierney said. “My wife paid a terrible price on that; she took responsibility for not knowing on that.

Via: Gloucester Times

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Report: Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago

The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures

This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. 
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years. 

global temperature changes

Research: The new figures mean that the 'pause' in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. This picture shows an iceberg melting in Eastern Greenland

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued  quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. 
This stands in sharp contrast  to the release of the previous  figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year. 
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.

Via: Daily Mail

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BACKFIRE: Medicare Bills Rise as Records Turn Electronic

When the federal government began providing billions of dollars in incentives to push hospitals and physicians to use electronic medical and billing records, the goal was not only to improve efficiency and patient safety, but also to reduce health care costs.

But, in reality, the move to electronic health records may be contributing to billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare, private insurers and patients by making it easier for hospitals and physicians to bill more for their services, whether or not they provide additional care.

Hospitals received $1 billion more in Medicare reimbursements in 2010 than they did five years earlier, at least in part by changing the billing codes they assign to patients in emergency rooms, according to a New York Times analysis of Medicare data from the American Hospital Directory. Regulators say physicians have changed the way they bill for office visits similarly, increasing their payments by billions of dollars as well.

The most aggressive billing — by just 1,700 of the more than 440,000 doctors in the country — cost Medicare as much as $100 million in 2010 alone, federal regulators said in a recent report, noting that the largest share of those doctors specialized in family practice, internal medicine and emergency care.

For instance, the portion of patients that the emergency department at Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare in Utica, N.Y., claimed required the highest levels of treatment — and thus higher reimbursements — rose 43 percent in 2009. That was the same year the hospital began using electronic health records.

The share of highest-paying claims at Baptist Hospital in Nashville climbed 82 percent in 2010, the year after it began using a software system for its emergency room records.

Via: NYT

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After 2010 Rebuke, Obama Never Turned to Center

The byzantine relations between President Obama and former president Bill Clinton could fill several psychology textbooks, providing juicy examples of passive aggression, older man/younger man competition, complex alliances (Hillary as secretary of state is the perfect embodiment of the maxim “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”), and mutual interests.

That the president needs Bill Clinton now to make his case to the country must be richly satisfying to the only American whose ego can compete with Barack H. Obama’s.

Let’s recall that one of Obama’s supposed triumphs in 2008 was defeating the vaunted Clinton machine. The Democratic party’s delirium for Obama supposedly obliterated the Clinton magic. After winning the South Carolina primary in January, Obama exulted that “we’re up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington. . . . But we know that real leadership is about candor and judgment and the ability to rally Americans . . . around a higher purpose . . .” Though he never tired (and still doesn’t) of insulting George W. Bush, that barb wasn’t aimed at him. It was for the Clintons. 

Bill Clinton, for his part, nurses grudges. Obama eclipsed Clinton as the most charismatic Democrat. The former president and his wife also got a crash course in media bias. Obama spoiled the Clintons’ carefully nurtured plan of returning to the White Houseand achieving vindication. And as someone who preened himself on his high standing among blacks (Toni Morrison called him America’s “first black president”), Clinton was justly outraged when Obama supporters Donna Brazile and Rep. Jim Clyburn accused him of racism in 2008 because he referred to Obama as a “kid” and dismissed his Iraq War stance as a “fairy tale.” Good thing he didn’t use the word “Chicago” or mention “golf” — as those are now “dog whistles,” we’re told.Now His Royal Majesty needs old Bill. He needs him to mount the stage in Charlotte and persuade waverers to reelect The One. Why? Because Clinton, for all his squalid ways, and for all that he was a practitioner par excellence of what Obama disdained as the “old politics,” has something Obama lacks — a successful economic legacy to brag about.

Via: Real Clear Politics

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NY Times Reports Romney Paid Federal Income Taxes-Will Harry Reid Apologize?

Even though he has not released his returns from earlier years, the 2010 return sheds some light on those years.

That’s because Mr. Romney paid income tax to foreign countries, and as result claimed in 2010 a $129,697 foreign tax credit, which he used to offset taxes he owed in the United States. American taxpayers who claim the foreign tax credit are required to report their total foreign taxes paid and tax credits used for the previous 10 years. So that return contains foreign tax data going back to 2000.

The good news for Mr. Romney is the forms suggest that he paid at least some federal income tax every year, as he has said he did. He used the foreign tax credit every year to offset his taxes in the United States, and American taxpayers can’t use a tax credit if they owe no federal income tax. This casts even more doubt on the claim by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, attributed to an unnamed Bain Capital source, that Mr. Romney paid no income taxes during that time.

Not that there was any real credence given to Harry Reid's appalling accusations, but this ought to at least shame Reid into publicly admitting he was wrong.

Via: Fox News

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