Undernews: September 20, 2012

SORRY TO HAVE GOTTEN SO BACKED UP, BUT WE'VE BEEN ON THE ROAD. . .

Morning line

Based on our moving average of polls.

Obama 3 points ahead of Romney

Electoral count: Obama 254 -183, just 16 electoral votes short of victory

Where there's a visible trend, Obama is improving in 5 states and declining in 3

Click for big version.
Obama blue, GOP red

Governors: Democrats stand to win one state with 4 Democratic seats held in doubt. GOP stands to pickup one with 3 GOP seats in doubt.

Senate: GOP is on target to pick up three seats with five other possibles. Democrats could possibly pick up two. Only four seats need change for GOP to win Senate. The Democrats are clearly in danger and the situation has gotten worse in recent weeks

4 POSSIBLE DEM GAINS
6 POSSIBLE GOP GAINS

iPhone users spend $6 billion on broken phones
A survey conducted by warranty provider SquareTrade of 2,000 iPhone users found that, based on the sample size, Americans have spent an estimated $5.9 billion on repairing and replacing broken phones over the past five years. That amount includes cost of repairs for minor issues and replacements fo...

Man wins $7 million in popcorn case
US jury has awarded a Colorado man $7.2 million (£4.4m) damages after claiming he developed 'popcorn lung' by inhaling a chemical used to flavour microwave popcorn. The jury in the case were in agreement with Wayne Watson's claim that the manufacturer who produced the popcorn, and the supermarket t...

GDP: One of America's most misleading numbers
Steven Stoll, Orion Magazine - The inventor of GDP, the economist Simon Kuznets, never intended it as an indicator of progress or happiness. Kuznets sent a report to Congress in 1934 that included a new way of reporting on the state of the economy, but cautioned that “the welfare of a nation can . ...

What Republicans really think
Listen to what Pennsylvania Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, chief sponsor of the state’s voter ID law, said in a radio interview yesterday: HOST: Are you absolutely convinced…that the methods to implement this law are effective and will in fact make sure no legitimate voter will be disenfranchised...

Some scientists question GMO rat study
NPR - Some of their complaints about the study are aimed at the study's methods. Critics point out that the type of experimental rats used in this study are particularly prone to tumors. So if you divide up 200 of them into twenty groups, as this study did, you are likely to get very high tumor rat...

New study zaps Monsanto GM corn
Metafilter - A new study on GM corn , conducted in secret by a French team of researchers led by Gilles-Eric Séralini , is to be published by Food and Chemical Toxicology . Its results are chilling. Started in 2006, the study managed to covertly acquire bags of Monsanto's NK 603. After a few years ...

Even rural areas becoming more diverse

Bookshelf: Electoral Dysfunction
From Worldwide Work Electoral Dysfunction by Victoria Bassetti ( The New Press ). More than 50 million Americans are not registered to vote despite being eligible. About a third of those who are registered don’t vote. Wealthy Americans vote at a far higher rate than working people. This book...

Monica Lewinsky plans to get back at Clinton
Daily Mail, UK - Monica Lewinsky is reportedly set to write a tell-all book about her affair with Bill Clinton - including her intimate love letters to the ex-president and how he had an insatiable desire for threesomes. The former White House intern, 39, reportedly wants revenge on Clinton, who sh...

Hedge funds involved in opposing teachers' strike
Firedog Lake - [An] anti-union ad played non-stop on television in Chicago throughout the strike. It’s the product of Education Reform Now, a group that also sometimes goes by Democrats for Education Reform, depending on what pot of money they want to use. Formed in 2005, Education Reform Now...

Great moments with bipolar Mitt
Caught by Firedog Lake The president’s foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception he has that his magnetism, and his charm, and his persuasiveness is so compelling that he can sit down with people like Putin and Chavez and Ahmadinejad and that they’ll find that we’re suc...

In looking for a job, long term unemployment is worse than a criminal record
A new survey has found that hiring managers and recruiters believe it is easier to place a candidate who has a job -- but who also has a criminal record -- than a person who has been unemployed for more than two years. Bullhorn, the recruiting software company, conducted an anonymous survey of 1,50...

Medical IT savings found to be little more than hype
Wall Street Journal - In two years, hundreds of thousands of American physicians and thousands of hospitals that fail to buy and install costly health-care information technologies¬such as digital records for prescriptions and patient histories¬will face penalties through reduced Medicare and Medic...

Stupid Philadelphia government tricks
Daily Mail, UK - A real estate developer who repeatedly sent in requests to buy a vacant lot next to some of his property was repeatedly denied or ignored by the city, he said. So Ori Feibush, who owns OCF Realty as well as OCF Coffee House, decided to take matters into his own hands, spending arou...

We redistributed it
Sam Smith - Barack Obama may have talked about redistribution in 1998, but at that time, Mitt Romney was walking the talk. He had set up an offshore account. For example, AP has reported: For nearly 15 years, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's financial portfolio has includ...

Another major musician supports piracy
Read Write Web - Ed Sheeran, the UK artist who currently holds the distinction of having the most BitTorrented song in that country, is sanguine about pirated songs. "I sell a lot of tickets. I've sold 1.2 million albums and there's eight million downloads as well, illegally," Sheeran told BBC's Ne...

Alaskan King salmon are disappearing
BBC - Over the past five years, Alaska's king salmon have begun to disappear from the state's rivers, and no-one is sure why. This summer's king salmon season yielded one of the lowest catches on record. The drop has devastated commerce and tourism, but the most dramatic effect has been on subsiste...

Lecturing the Occupiers
Sam Smith One of the ways you can tell a movement is making progress is when those who don’t like it start telling it how to function. It’s a little like Pat Robertson lecturing a bunch of Unitarians, but the people who do it are so used to calling the shots in life that they see nothing absurd abo...

Football: the game where hardly anything happens
David Biderman, Wall Street Journal - According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes. In other words, if you tally up everything that happens...

Great Israeli predictions
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor 1992: Israeli member of parliament Binyamin Netanyahu predicts that Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon. 1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres predicts an Iranian nuclear warhead by 1999 to French TV. 1995: The New York Times quotes U...

Small business owners favor Obama
US News - Small business owners believe President Barack Obama would be more supportive of them than GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, according to a new study by George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management with local services site Thumbtack. The majority of small b...

Word: Speaking of free loaders
@ TimothyS - Do contractors like SAIC, Booz and CACI that make 90% of their money from government count as dependent freeloaders?

Word
@ BorowitzReport - Romney's candidacy is coming dangerously close to qualifying as a prank.

What Romney ignored about the 47%
For example, most people who don't pay federal income taxes do pay other federal taxes. And, while we're on the subject, wouldn't this be a good time for Romney to reveal what federal taxes he didn't pay? Ctr for Budget & Policy Priorities - Close to half of U.S. households currently do not owe fed...

Poll review
@ fivethirtyeight There have been 417 national polls since 6/1. Number of times candidate polled at greater or equal to 50%? Obama: Just 31. Romney? Zero.

Medical marijuana, end of life measures look solid in Massachusetts
Suffolk University Poll - Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) supported the proposed Prescribing Medication to End Life law, which would allow Massachusetts licensed physicians to prescribe life-ending medication at the request of terminally ill patients meeting certain conditions. And 59 percent suppor...

Sales of cars to under 30s dropping
CNN The share of new cars purchased by those aged 18-34 dropped 30% in the last five years, according to the car shopping web site Edmunds.com. Some say the economy is mostly to blame -- that the young aren't buying because they've been particularly hard hit by the recession . But others say the tr...

Marijuana legalization leads in Colorado
A Denver Post poll finds Colorado's marijuana legalization referendum with an eleven point lead.

Obama beats Romney on Mid East reaction
Political Wire - A new Pew Research survey finds that just 26% of those who have followed news on the attacks on U.S. embassies in the Middle East approve of Mitt Romney's comments on the situation, while 48% disapprove. In contrast, 45% approve of President Obama's handling of the rece...

83% of Americans want some limits on campaign spending

Someone Rahm Emanuel likes much more than teachers or students
Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer - In Chicago, Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker. . . .the 719th richest person in the world according to Forbes , has been showered with tax breaks by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's government while she sits on the board of the public school system. In fact, she got a $5.2 mil...

Summer sea ice gone in four years?
Guardian, UK - One of the world's leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years. In what he calls a "global disaster" now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever re...

The failure of publicly funded private schools (aka charters)
In These Times - In recent years, major studies suggest that, on the whole, charter schools are producing worse educational achievement results than traditional public schools . For example, a landmark study from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes discovered that ...

The rise of the medical bureaucracy
Physicians for a National Health Program

Romney's Medicare plan would hurt seniors
Washington Post - It has been a central campaign promise from Mitt Romney: His Medicare overhaul plan would not touch benefits for anyone older than 55. That may not, however, be the case with the Republican presidential nominee’s other health-care proposals. A growing body of research suggests tha...

France to maintain ban on genetically modified crops
Common Dreams - France will maintain its ban on genetically modified crops [GMOs] and will ban fracking, politicians announced during an environmental conference held in Paris Friday and Saturday. "The government is keeping its moratorium on the cultivation of GMO seeds currently authorized in the ...

Study: Cutting top tax rates doesn't help economy
There is no clear correlation between tax cuts for high earners and economic growth, according to a new study by Congress’ nonpartisan policy analyst. “There is not conclusive evidence, however, to substantiate a clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rat...

District attorneys in bed with strong armed debt collectors
Boing Boing - Over 300 US district attorneys have made arrangements with strong-arm debt collectors , through which the debt collectors send out threatening notices on the DAs' letterhead to people who've allegedly bounced checks, and split the payments they get back (including hefty "service fees"...

Neil Young: Piracy is the new radio
Tech Dirt - Neil Young apparently isn't too concerned about copyright infringement these days, according to his comments at the D: Dive into Media conference: It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [....] Piracy is the new radio. That's how...

The flaw in Bloomberg's soda tyranny
Sam Smith - Stopping by a Mobil station in Portland, ME, your editor suddenly discovered a fatal - and perhaps legally fatal - flaw in Mayor Bloomberg's tyrannical limit on the size of sodas. It was a surprising place to discover it since Maine has long been a somewhat frustrating place to get a so...

Drought damage across the U.S.
Department of Hmm......
Embedded US media can't figure out why Muslims aren't grateful

Bi-polar Mitt on climate change
RD Tucker, Brad Blog - There's the Romney who tells the Republican National Convention and Meet the Press' David Gregory: "I'm not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet. I'm in this race to help the American people." . . . I would have no problem voting for a candidate w...

Sleeper problem for healthcare mandate
WND - The penalties Americans will be required to pay under Obamacare for going without health insurance were declared constitutional in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that hinged on Chief Justice John Roberts’ assertion that the assessments are taxes. But a legal challenge to the federal government...

We still don't get it
Sam Smith Name one significant thing that America has done in the past 11 years to reduce the anger many Muslims feel towards our land. As I noted in 2003, "I regret that we got the Muslim world so mad at us and that we couldn't come up with any better solution than to get it madder." One obvious w...

Good way to get rid of the naked British royalty problem
Get rid of the British royalty, one of the most expensive superfluous institutions in the modern world.

Fact Sheet: Sick Leave
38 percent of private-sector workers lack even one paid sick day. This percentage is lower for full-time private-sector workers (25 percent), but it is significantly higher for part-time workers, with 73 percent lacking access. Full-time workers are more than three times as likely to have access to...

GOP/Dems joined to prevent you hearing third party candidates in debates

America's first gentically modified presidential candidate
Truth Out - One of Bain’s founding partners, Ralph Willard, described to the Boston Globe in 2007 how “Romney learned the technical aspects of the chemical business so thoroughly that he sounded as if he had gone to engineering school instead of business school,” and that Monsanto executives soon b...

Rahm Emanuel's privatize Chicago plan
Stephen Lendman - Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel spent years waging war on progressive politics. He's a corporate predator turned politician. As White House strategist and senior adviser, he represented the worst of the Clinton years. His abrasive style earned him the nickname "Rahmbo." From 1999 - 2002....

Why do pot users go to prison and this guy gets probation?
SF Gate - A former girlfriend of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer 's younger brother said in court Friday that she delayed reporting his alleged domestic violence because he threatened to use his family's "power and influence" to ruin her name if she went to police. In a statement read in court, Kelli Ann …

Great thoughts of Mitch McConnell
I am amused with their comments about obstructionism. I wish we had been able to obstruct more. They were able to get the health care bill through. They were able to get the stimulus through. They were able to get the financial reform through. These were all major pieces of legislation, and if I wou…

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