hat tip to @jfleck
America Is Europe – NYTimes.com
Republicans are perpetually trying to do what Ronald Reagan did. But top tax rates today aren’t as onerous as they were in 1980, so lowering them won’t produce as many benefits. Imagine if Reagan ran for office promising to recreate the glory days of Thomas Dewey and you get a sense of how much G.O.P. thinking is stuck in the past.
The study measures blood levels of a compound from rosemary; presumably eating it also raises those levels. I add rosemary to my roasted veggies (brussel sprouts, onion, garlic, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, sweet potatoes, etc, tossed in olive oil, curry, red and black pepper, and salt). The smoke from rosemary twigs on the barbeque enhances grilled meats (and *may* reduce mutagens).
Catching up on new Rasmussen poll of NM | NMPolitics.net
President Barack Obama leads Republican Rick Santorum 55 percent to 37 percent and Mitt Romney 55 percent to 36 percent in potential head-to-head contests, reports The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Steve Terrell.
Capitalism is a conspiracy: a big stupid clumsy stumbling conspiracy that banks on ignorance quite successfully.
Processed food and coronary capitalism – Opinion – Al Jazeera English [hat tip to dangerousmeta]
Highly processed corn-based food products, with lots of chemical additives, are well known to be a major driver of weight gain, but, from a conventional growth-accounting perspective, they are great stuff. Big agriculture gets paid for growing the corn (often subsidised by the government), and the food processors get paid for adding tonnes of chemicals to create a habit-forming – and thus irresistible – product. Along the way, scientists get paid for finding just the right mix of salt, sugar and chemicals to make the latest instant food maximally addictive; advertisers get paid for peddling it; and, in the end, the healthcare industry makes a fortune treating the disease that inevitably results.
Coronary capitalism is fantastic for the stock market, which includes companies in all of these industries. Highly processed food is also good for jobs, including high-end employment in research, advertising and healthcare.
So, who could complain? Certainly not politicians, who get re-elected when jobs are plentiful and stock prices are up – and get donations from all of the industries that participate in the production of processed food. Indeed, in the US, politicians who dared to talk about the health, environmental, or sustainability implications of processed food would in many cases find themselves starved of campaign funds.
Processed food and coronary capitalism – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
Take Action on SuperPACs and Misleading Advertising
TV and radio stations are required to air political ads from candidates for federal office, Jamieson points out, but that rule doesn’t apply to third-party advertising; station managers run those at their own discretion. Jamieson is calling on regular citizens to encourage their local TV stations to reject misleading political ads. But can conscience defeat cash? Jamieson’s website, Flackcheck.org, makes it easy for users to contact their local station managers.
Watch Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center make her case [at the link].
That, or being unknowable.
This graph compares the moderate estimates for each candidates’ debt plan against the president’s. This is all smart guesswork, mind you, but it offers a nonpartisan view of the sort of "deficit reduction" we’re really getting under these proposals. This Y-axis starts at 60, which is the target debt/GDP ratio for CRFB.
