AdamSmith

There seems something inherently wrong when one candidate is backed/funded by the Koch brothers and their assorted companies to the tune of 400 million dollars. Yep. That is what I heard. 400 Simoleons.
And Hitooallusa, let me give you a piece of unsolicited advice, beware of the guy who tells you it is raining when the inside of your boot feels wet. More likely than not, he's been pissing in it.
Just like the 2011 returns. He purposely did not take the full deductions for his tithe to the Mormon church. Otherwise putting a lie to his 13 percent claims. Or it would have been around 9 percent. After the election, he can go back, and most likely will, amend them.
Can you imagine what one would find in his other years that he won't release?
How is it that the stated "greatest country on earth" has reached this level that this type of candidate can be running so strong against an incumbent president who has avoided letting us fall into a full depression, saved the auto industry, enacted real health care law, ended the war in Iraq, abolished don't act/don't tell, stopped enforcement of DOMA, reformed the student loan mess, Kagen and Sotomayor. Dream Act. Killed Qaddafi and Bin Laden.

My problem is that we don't have a free and unfettered mainstream press anymore, we have an entirely corporate dominated one. Favorite description of Fox "News" I've ever seen:
"Fox News: Billionaires paying millionaires to tell the middle class to blame the poor."
So I think we desperately need to re-introduce media ownership, media market domination, and "equal time" types of regulations RFN!
In the internet age I don't believe complete censorship can ever be a problem again. Wikileaks makes the Pentagon Papers look like nothing!
At the same time we have bullshit like Infowars getting gullible people riled up about inconsequential stuff, instead of the things that affect them which they could actually influence...
How'd we get on this topic though?

May MsGuy absolve me...but intriguing, to say the least.
'The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife,' New Early Christian Text, Indicates Jesus May Have Been Married
A discovery by a Harvard researcher may shed light on a controversial aspect of the life of Jesus Christ.
Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King says she has found an ancient papyrus fragment from the fourth century that, when translated, appears to indicate that Jesus was married.
The text is being dubbed "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife." The part of it that's drawing attention says, "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'" in the Coptic language. The text, which is printed on papyrus the size of a business card, has not been scientifically tested to verify its dating, but King and other scholars have said they are confident it is a genuine artifact.
"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday. "This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before they began appealing to Jesus’ marital status to support their positions."
King, who focuses on Coptic literature, Gnosticism and women in the Bible, has published on the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. She presented her research Tuesday evening in Rome, where scholars are gathered for the International Congress of Coptic Studies.
The idea that Jesus was unmarried and chaste is largely accepted by Christian denominations and a reason for the practice of celibacy among Roman Catholic priests.
"Beyond internal Catholic Church politics, a married Jesus invites a reconsideration of orthodox teachings about gender and sex," said journalist and author Michael D'Antonio, who writes about the Catholic Church, in a blog on The Huffington Post. "If Jesus had a wife, then there is nothing extra Christian about male privilege, nothing spiritually dangerous about the sexuality of women, and no reason for anyone to deny himself or herself a sexual identity."
The quote about Jesus' wife is part of a description of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples. In the conversation, Jesus talks about his mother twice and speaks once about his wife. One of them is identified as "Mary." His disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy of being part of their community, to which Jesus replies, “she will able to be my disciple.”
The fragment has eight incomplete lines of writing on one side and is badly damaged on the other side, with only three faded words and a few letters of ink that are visible, even with the use of infrared photography and computer-aided enhancement.
The private owner of the papyrus first approached King in 2010. King said she didn't believe the document was authentic, but the owner persisted. She then asked the owner to bring the papyrus to Harvard, where she became convinced it was a genuine early Christian text fragment. Along with Princeton University professor Anne Marie Luijendijk and Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, King claims to have confirmed the document is real. The document's owner has not been named and King said he does not want to be identified.
It's unclear when the text was initially discovered. The owner who showed it to King found it in 1997 in a collection of papyri that he acquired from the previous owner, who was German. The papyri included a handwritten German description that had the name of a now-deceased professor of Egyptology in Berlin who called the fragment a "sole example" of a document that claims Jesus was married.
The scholars believe the text is from Egyptian Christians before the year 400, as it is written in the language used at that time. Since writing appears on both sides of the fragment, scholars believe it came from a codex, a kind of book, and not a scroll. The scholars also believe the document is a translation of an earlier one that was likely written in Greek.
King notes in her research that the idea of Jesus' celibacy hasn't always existed, and that early Christians debated whether they should marry or practice celibacy. It was not until around the year 200 that Christian followers began to say Jesus was unmarried, according to a record King cites from Clement of Alexandria. In his writing, Clement -- an early theologian -- said that marriage was a fornication put in place by the devil, and that people should emulate Jesus by not marrying.
One or two decades later, Tertullian of Carthage in North Africa declared that Jesus was "entirely unmarried" and told Christians to remain single. But Tertullian did not come out against sex altogether and allowed couples to get married one time, denouncing divorce and remarriage as overindulgent. A century earlier, the First Epistle of Paul to Timothy said in the New Testament that people who forbid marriage are going by the "doctrines of demons," but did not include anything about Jesus being married in order to make the point.
The point of view that ultimately became dominant was that celibacy is preferred as a high sexual virtue among Christians, but that marriage is needed for the sake of reproduction.
"The discovery of this new gospel," King said, "offers an occasion to rethink what we thought we knew by asking what role claims about Jesus' marital status played historically in early Christian controversies over marriage, celibacy, and family. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife now shows that some Christians thought otherwise."
The life of historical Jesus is often a matter of controversy, and this is not the first time it's been proposed that Jesus was married. Most recently, Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" depicted Jesus as being married to Mary Magdalene. The book was published as fiction, but nonetheless attracted loud criticism from Vatican officials.
Front of fragment with translation
Back of fragment with translation
UPDATE: 4:28 p.m. -- Speaking on a conference call Tuesday from Rome, King said that some people who have read about the discovery have asked if the papyrus fragment was describing Jesus as being married to the Christian faith, not to a woman.
"One cannot overrule that it might be him saying 'my wife as a church,' but in the context where he's talking about 'my mother' and 'my wife' and talking about 'my disciple,' the one thing you would not say is that the church would be 'my disciple.'"
Even before King's discovery, there has been speculation that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. "I do not think Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene," King clarified Tuesday, adding, "whether he was or was not married ... I really think the tradition is silent and we don't know."
King also said that a professor who saw her report asked her if the text on the papyrus could have been a homily and not a gospel, an idea she said she had not considered.
King added that she hopes the discovery will diminish the view outside of academic circles that the debate over marriage and sexuality in the early church is "fixed and over." In current church debates over issues such as same-sex marriage and marriage among Catholic priests, "having more voices from the early church and a better, more accurate version of early Christianity is more helpful," she said.
UPDATE FROM AP: 8:33 a.m.

Wolf-Peter Funk, a noted Coptic linguist and co-director of the francophone project editing the Nag Hammadi Coptic library at Laval University in Quebec, said there were "thousands of scraps of papyrus where you find crazy things," and that many questions remain unanswered about the Harvard fragment.
http://www.huffingto...ref=mostpopular

Update:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Gay Marriage Likely To Go Before Supreme Court Within The Next Year

BOULDER, Colo. -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Wednesday that she believes the Defense of Marriage Act will likely go to the U.S. Supreme Court within the next year.
Ginsburg spoke at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She was asked a student-submitted question about the equal-protection clause and whether the nation's high court would consider it applying to sexual orientation.
Ginsburg said with a smile that she couldn't answer the question. She said she could not talk about matters that would come to the court, and that the Defense of Marriage Act would probably be up soon.
"I think it's most likely that we will have that issue before the court toward the end of the current term," she said.
The 1996 law has been declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in New York and is awaiting arguments before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Those oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 27.
The law was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton after the Hawaii Supreme Court issued a ruling in 1993 making it appear Hawaii might legalize gay marriage.
Since then, many states have banned gay marriage, while eight states have approved it, led by Massachusetts in 2004 and continuing with Connecticut, New York, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland and Washington state. Maryland and Washington's laws aren't yet in effect and might be subject to referendums.
In February 2011, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder instructed the Department of Justice to no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
Ginsburg's remarks came at a conference sponsored by the University of Colorado law school. Ginsburg talked mostly about entering the legal profession when there were few female lawyers and even fewer judges.
The students roared with laughter when Ginsburg told of scrambling even to find a women's restroom in law school at Columbia University in the 1950s.
"We never complained, that's just the way it was," she said to laughter from the students.
___
Associated Press Writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report.
http://www.huffingto..._n_1898815.html

The Iowa Electronic Market , an Iowa University Business School sponsered stock market that allows folks to buy & sell 'contracts' on Obama's or Romney's chances, currently (9/18) has Obama trading at $.728 and Romney at $.299. Basically you get paid $1.00/contract if the Dems (or Repubs) wins the popular vote and zip if they lose. Max investment is $500 and a total of $78,766 worth of contracts are currently outstanding.
In plain English, people betting their own real life money are willing to pay 73 cents for a dollar's worth of Obama but only 30 cents for a buck's worth of Romney. Historically the IEM's predictive power has beaten the average for the experts and has been better than most polls (until 2 or 3 weeks before the election). Like any other stock market, it operates on a form of crowd wisdom.

No need to apologize. Mitt did all those things, not you.
Hell Week is right for him. And the polls are part of that Hell. electoral-vote.com, an aggregator of latest polling data nationwide, currently shows 323 electoral votes to Obama, 206 to Romney, 9 ties. That is one Hell of a gap to close in 7 weeks.
...Come to think, the mass of Mitt's self-inflicted wounds puts me in mind of Milton's Satan, saying Hell is not just a place, but rather...
"Myself am Hell!"

If you can link it, I can stomach it, lookin.

Please note, however, however sneaky and anonymously the API operated, at least it utilized attack ads featuring issues connected to the interests it sought to advance.
I foresee, in the not too distant future, corporations will discard this artificial constraint. The ultimate stealth campaign: survey the target's district for random hot wire local issues and fire away from a multitude of false fronts. No way to connect 'Citizens Against the I10 Interchange' to Merc Pharmaceutical but another vote for generic drugs goes down all the same.
Come to think about it, that's not all that much different from those 'independant' expenditures echoing Romney's "Times are hard and Obama, bless his heart, aint up to the job." Don't talk about what you'll be wanting from Romney, just take whacks at Obama.
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Netanyahu delenda est!
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Maybe I should change that to Citizens United delenda est! At least Netanyahu is out in the open about his goals.

I am becoming a polling junky. I continue to keep on looking at the NYTimes 538, HuffPost and WaPost as antidote to whatever fantasy numbers Rassymusn't is pulling out of Karl Rove's fat tush. Err, can I say a_s on here?
I can only imagine what is going on with the campaigns' polling operations, besides what all of the other polls are producing. Hey, can anyone on actually pronounce the QuininePenisAct one, or something, whatever is the spelling of that poll? In any event, I can only imagine that the back office operationsin Boston must be the theater of the absurd, in real time. Better than any show on TV. Except for Glee and Good Wife. Oh, and Real Time, of course. For some reason I keep on getting the bridge scene from the film Titanic stuck in my thoughts. I have this sinking feeling...
I suppose that Willard wishes that this past week's three owies could be as forgetten as the previously ignored requests to see his ten year's worth of mystery returns, info on the Caymen Islands/Swiss bank accounts and of course, polygamous, great grandpappy. Yep. His ancestor fled to Mex-EE-Co so he could live that sister wife dream.
Finally, did Mittens muddy his Magic Panties when he first saw the leaked excerpts from the 50K/plate Boca trip?

Maureen Dowd is just not the same. She is a touch too strident. Interesting. Gets right in there. But no sense of the irony in a situation.

Who made up THAT rule?
Anyway, if I followed that rule, then where would my spouse go to have sex?

As a balance to right-wing, always seeing the bright side, Peggy Noonan, I could really use a dose of Molly Ivans, right about now. She was always good for a smile and a laugh, God rest her soul.

What he 'meant' is open for intrepretation. Whether he was writing off the 47% in the election or as a concern central to his governing principles, you decide. I tend to give peoples actions more weight than I give their words -- written or spoken. Especially when those words are tailored to the audience so specifically as to say different things to different crowds or at different times.
I have not read the Romney book but I did see him up close as a Governor and I'm generally familiar with his tenure at Bain. I believe him to be a caring compassionate deeply flawed man. Caring and compassionate on a personal level with those he comes into contact in everyday life, much of it insular as his is. Cold and calculating with regard to those far removed from his personal sphere.
As a Mormon he is charitable and very open to helping his fellow man. As a business man he is Harry Lime incarnate who uses law rather than skirts it.
Harry Lime was a central character in the 1949 move: The Third Man played by Orson Wells. He was a petty crook in post war Europe who stole and cut penicillin with water and sold in on the black market at the expense of many lives. When asked by Joseph Cotton why he did this, while they were sitting on top of a Ferris Wheel in an amusement park, Harry Lime said "to make money". When asked how he could harm so many people he remarked that the people below looked just like ants, worthy of no more concern.
When Mitt sits high atop Bain he sees the employees of his companies as not ants, exactly, but as beans - worthy of no more concern. That us how one can put a company into bankruptcy after stripping it of tens and hundreds of milions of dollars in pension funds and walk way fat and happy -- time and again. If one doesn't think he'll bring this bean vision perspective to his Presidency should he win then people are ignoring his record of actions. Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, college loans, education support, etc. will be cut deeply if not eliminated, if he can get away with it. A GOP Congress would fall all over themselves to assist in the dismantling of The New Deal and The Great Society programs. All the while being a warm compassionate friend to all those in his circle at the West Wing and at his church.

Noonan REALLY lets Romney have it with both barrels:
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/?mod=e2tw

As TY says, identifying attributes, at least to and for oneself, seems more useful and informative than trying to corral them into one or another (of somebody else's) set of boxes.
I find I usually want sex with men more strongly than I do with women. But not always; depends on mood, moment, individual partner. Likewise, my romances have almost always been with men, but not entirely.
Those are phenomena that describe the situation. Whereas what do labels really do these days? "Gay" is good in context of pressing publicly for social change. "Queer" I like because it can draw strong reaction one way or the other. "Bi" is so contaminated by now that it frequently derails any discussion into catcalls between the person who self-applies it and accusers leaping to charge "You're in denial," "There's really no such thing," etc., despite what Kinsey et al. showed long ago about the continuum.
I prefer "quad," having slept with 3 of the 4 sexes, having yet only to meet Vic Hunt, the Boy with a Cunt.

Charlie, you are not alone. I share a similar 'diversity' of attributes even if individual specifics differ here and there. So have others I have met through these boards. All kinds make up a community.
As for the American culture desire to put everything in a category, if not a box. Well, that goes with seeing EVERYTHING as a horse race of winners and losers and identifying who is 'number one' in some vacuous category or sense. Being number 2 just doesn't matter, even if in field of thousands. Who, other than a sports minutia nut, can name a number two in the Boston Marathon? Nobody cares in this culture.

Hilarious! Thx.

Well ... having always been alternately laconic and an old cuss at least makes it harder for people to figure out when you're actually starting to lose it.

They may not be as far behind as you think. While direct corporate donations to Super PACs can be spotted through timely disclosure rules, such rules do not apply to trade associations which must identify contributions only once a year, long after their influence has been felt. The disclosure rules do apply to trade unions, however, so the trade associations enjoy a level of opacity available to few U. S. citizens or organizations. So much for free and fair elections.
If you have the stomach for another article, try this one. It documents how the American Petroleum Institute scuttled any hope of passing climate legislation, even as the world endured unprecedented weather events. The API, only one of many trade groups flexing its muscle across the country, represents not only U. S. corporations but also outside interests like Saudi Arabia, whose Saudi Refining Inc. chief executive sat on the Board of the API as it was funneling money into Washington in 2010.
In fact, 2010 was the first year in which spending by outside interests overshadowed spending by all political parties combined. The sources of the trade-group spending did not become apparent until well after the 2010 elections and legislative actions, just as we will not see who contributed to this year's elections and legislation until 2013.
Another article in The Nation estimates that, since the Citizens United ruling, these 'trade associations' have increased their spending ten-fold and will reach nearly $800 million this year.



And, as you say, these are the early days of the shift to a corporate plutocracy. What Bill Moyers characterizes as 'seeing it in spades' is not inconsistent, in my opinion, with the likelihood that we will be seeing it in steam-shovelfuls if we don't find a way to intercede.

With you that the party as a whole may get overconfident. Already some noises out of Obama HQ seem to have been cautioning against this.
But one thing I don't too much fear is that Alexrod and the Chicago machine will not be spending considerable time thinking about just this danger of being blindsided, and how to outfox anything that may be thrown up.
(As, in the Manhattan Project, Oppie specifically put Edward Teller in charge of the, as Richard Rhodes says, "deliciously Tellerian" task of trying to figure out if there was any way the chain reaction could run out of control and ignite the atmosphere.)

OK, one of my faves from the '90's, Barry Watson. And he doesn't look too shabby today either.

. . .

Not huge,,, but quite nice http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/love-is-the-devil

Agree completely, and will add the Supreme Court to the rout necessary to begin bringing the federal government back into the hands of the people. Not "persons", which the Court has redefined to include corporations, but actual people - the 'government by, for, and of' kind of people who used to be the ones who got to decide elections.
If you can spare a half-hour or so, watch the recent Bill Moyers segment on 'The 1% Court' and/or read the article of the same name in The Nation.
If Moyers' opening lines don't concern us, the war may already be lost:
When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed corporations and the super-rich the right to overwhelm our elections with tsunamis of cash, they moved America further from representative government toward outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to protecting wealth.
We saw it first in the mid-term elections of 2010, and we’re seeing it in spades in this year’s elections – organized money, much of it dark money, given secretly So it can’t be traced, enveloping the campaign for president, Congressional campaigns, and state legislative and judicial races. There’s never been anything like it in our history – not on this scale, and not this sinister.

Sometimes I cannot believe what I am reading. It is hard for me to assemble my outrage at what is being attempted by the some very wealthy Republican contributors. I keep on waiting for the newest polling numbers to be released.
This op-ed by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine kind of summarizes the May R Money tape
Something in here, paraphrasing Forrest Gump, about evil is as evil says:
Presidential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser are such an event — they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency.
To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney.
Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)
It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class — “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Romney explained to reporters tonight that his remarks were not "elegantly stated," but did not repudiate them as his true beliefs. In fact, it was quite eloquently stated. The Romney speaking to fund-raisers was not the halting, smarmy figure so frequently on public display but an eloquent and passionate orator. He had no reason to believe his donors needed to hear him denounce the poor — they would have been perfectly satisfied with a bromide about how cutting taxes on the rich will create opportunity for one and all. Instead he put himself forward as the hopeful president of the top half of America against the bottom.
Some pundits have likened Romney’s comments to Barack Obama’s 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fund-raiser, about his difficulties with white working class voters in rural Pennsylvania. But the spirit of Obama’s remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney’s. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama’s argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them:


But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.
Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.
The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

No, I don't think so. Republicans have an entire network that would gladly spend 24 hours a day even on manufactured untrue BS against Democrats / the President. Remember the asshat with the hidden camera at Acorn?
The Republicans and say-anything Romney deserve every fucking minute of this, my only regret in the matter is that Dems may get overconfident and get blindsided by a long-planned dirty trick or that the feeling Obama's already won combined with evil voter suppression efforts actually endanger the outcome.
Not to mention, the Republicans have made it clear they will not allow the president to get a god damned thing done as long as they control the house of even a "superminority" of senators. So a massive route is the only path to the change Americans are finally starting to demand!