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October 25, 2011 03:44 PM UTC

Tuesday Open Thread

  • 42 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

–Will Rogers

Comments

42 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread

    1. and I assume you mean the Shrub (I’m not watching.)

      There was an awesome piece by Allen Barra in the Village Voice sports section about 20 years ago about the difference between Dallas Cowboy fans and those of the Giants and Redskins as they took turns beating the Bills in the Super Bowl.

      It went something like “This collection of gun-fellating death-penalty enthusiasts with their arms draped insensate over the shoulders of some wannabe Kilgore Rangerettes whose eyelashes cantilever alarmingly with a layer of mascara…(I forgot this part)…and shout “Buck Fufallo” or some other taunt which wouldn’t have passed for witty in Neanderthal times.”

      He also said of Charles Oakley: “He couldn’t post a letter if you gave him an envelope and a stamp.”  

  1. from Jonathan Ive

    Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”

    And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

    And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

    1. I love how he smokes a cigarette (or was that a spleef) to show he _______(is a real American, drag on the health care system, doesn’t need social security).

      Why is the CoS talking not the candidate?

  2. Women infected with the human papillomavirus, or HPV, are two to three times as likely as uninfected women to have had a heart attack or stroke, according to a report published on Monday in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

    HPV is known to cause cancer of the cervix, vulva, penis, anus and throat, but the new study is the first to connect the virus to heart disease. The heart findings are not definitive: They show the virus may be associated with heart disease, but do not prove it caused the disease.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10

    1. Unlike in Perry’s puritanical and patriarchal Texas, where only girls and women are at risk of becoming “harlots” if protected by a vaccine, elsewhere in the country boys and men also have been known to engage in loose sexual behavior (not often, of course, to be sure).

      Get tested and get vaccinated. If you don’t think this is a gruesome virus, Google some photos sometime–but not near mealtime.

  3. At a time when medical experts are rethinking screening guidelines for prostate and cervical cancer, many doctors say it’s also time to set the record straight about mammography screening for breast cancer. While most agree that mammograms have a place in women’s health care, many doctors say widespread “Pink Ribbon” campaigns and patient testimonials have imbued the mammogram with a kind of magic it doesn’t have…

    A new analysis published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine offers a stark reality check about the value of mammography screening. Despite numerous testimonials from women who believe “a mammogram saved my life,” the truth is that most women who find breast cancer as a result of regular screening have not had their lives saved by the test, conclude two Dartmouth researchers, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and Brittney A. Frankel…

    Among the 60 percent of women with breast cancer who detected the disease by screening, only about 3 percent to 13 percent of them were actually helped by the test, the analysis concluded.

    Translated into real numbers, that means screening mammography helps 4,000 to 18,000 women each year. Although those numbers are not inconsequential, they represent just a small portion of the 230,000 women given a breast cancer diagnosis each year, and a fraction of the 39 million women who undergo mammograms each year in the United States.

    Dr. Welch says it’s important to remember that of the 138,000 women found to have breast cancer each year as a result of mammography screening, 120,000 to 134,000 are not helped by the test…

    “The presumption often is that anyone who has had cancer detected has survived because of the test, but that’s not true,” Dr. Welch said. “In fact, and I hate to have to say this, in screen-detected breast and prostate cancer, survivors are more likely to have been overdiagnosed than actually helped by the test.”

    How is it possible that finding cancer early isn’t always better? One way to look at it is to think of four different categories of breast cancer found during screening tests. First, there are slow-growing cancers that would be found and successfully treated with or without screening. Then there are aggressive cancers, so-called bad cancers, that are deadly whether they are found early by screening, or late because of a lump or other symptoms. Women with cancers in either of these groups are not helped by screening.

    Then there are innocuous cancers that would never have amounted to anything, but they still are treated once they show up as dots on a mammogram. Women with these cancers are subject to overdiagnosis – meaning they are treated unnecessarily and harmed by screening.

    Finally, there is a fraction of cancers that are deadly but, when found at just the right moment, can have their courses changed by treatment. Women with these cancers are helped by mammograms. Clinical trial data suggests that 1 woman per 1,000 healthy women screened over 10 years falls into this category, although experts say that number is probably even smaller today because of advances in breast cancer treatments.

    http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/

  4. And he was so-o-o-o-o excited about this and so convinced libruls, especially me, were peeing our pants or having heart pounding nightmares over it but….

    It made headlines when it was revealed in a new book that Steve Jobs had told President Barack Obama he’d be a one-termer if he weren’t more business-friendly.

    The revelation comes from Walter Isaacson’s just-published authorized biography of Jobs, but the author tells POLITICO that the Apple founder was still backing Obama, despite his concerns.

    “That got overblown,” said Isaacson. “He was really into supporting Obama in 2012…He wanted to make ads for Obama.”

    http://www.politico.com/news/s

    This is completely leaving aside the question of how much do we really care what Jobs views on politics and policy were? The ads would have been nice.  He was a great salesman.

      1. Sorry about the mess. But if said Boulder high tech, small business, start up, entreprenuer’s  political or policy ideas and insights are anything to go by, I think not depending too much on Jobs as an authority outside his own sphere is probably not such a bad idea.

          1. Republican controlled congress blocks everything that might be help us climb out of the deep, deep hole the last President, who promised to be CEO in Chief and run government like a business, dug for us.  

              1. Simply observing that, with good government, as with education and health care, CEOs and their business models have an extremely poor record of delivering improvement so I see no reason to over-value Jobs or any other business wiz kid’s opinion in this sphere.

                Am not aware that my statement that the GOP now controls congress is inaccurate. They hold the majority in the house in which a simple majority rules and hold enough votes in the other to filibuster anything they don’t like.

                Nowhere have I said Dems are blameless so I don’t particularly feel a need to invent excuses.

              2.  to have a keen understanding of who is really responsible for this failure.  

                Chris Hayes, on his Sat. morning show, presented a venn diagram that showed the interface between the Tea Party POV and that of OWS.

                Both sides believe the rich and powerful are screwing them but the Tea Partiers think its’ government and OWS thinks it’s big business. Of course, it’s both.

                A good comparison, I think, can be made between the fight for Colorados’ new oil and gas rules, and the struggle we see today.

                For many years, the usual suspects in Colorado, essentially the environmental “community”, struggled to bring some balance to the way Colorado develops minerals. Fighting the twin titans of the worlds’ richest industry and a  complicit government, success was limited.

                When the “Cheney tide” descended on the Rocky Mountains, the pain became widespread, more and more people and communities were affected, and a coalition of many diverse groups finally saw a common enemy and then a common goal and fought together to ultimately win.

                Once the Tea Partiers fully realize the republican corporatists have duped them again, I can see a huge turn of the tide against Wall Street. As long as the Koch brothers and their allies can continue to control the message with money and keep the Tea party in line with their ideological, knee-jerk, social issues, it will be difficult to build a coalition beyond the independents and progressives.

                Ultimately, the Perry/Cain 2012 ticket will spell the end of Tea Party control of our government.

                There…I said it…and I have my fingers crossed.   🙂  

                1. The Tea Party pretends to be populist but it really sprang up as the I can’t believe a Black Guy is our President and all Taxes are Bad Party. They show little interest in corporate ownership and control of our government, the growing income gap leaving 99% fighting for scraps left behind by the top fraction of a percent or anything else that you’d expect populists to be concerned about.

                  I wouldn’t bet on a Perry/Cain ticket, either. If we get any white Republican Prez it won’t matter how tough things get for the lower 99% , what the unemployment rate gets to be or how hard it is to get decent healthcare without going bankrupt. The Tea Party will fizzle as long as there’s no black family in the WH and tax cuts continue even if they’re only for the rich.  It’s not as if they noticed that 90%, and that includes most TPers, paid lower taxes after Obama was elected.

                  1. I’m projecting here and you are right about the seeming obliviousness they exhibit when it comes to the real reasons for our national plight.


                    the growing income gap leaving 99% fighting for scraps left behind by the top fraction of a percent or anything else that you’d expect populists to be concerned about.

                    I just keep thinking that it works out this way; The GO(T)P convention turns into a contentious nightmare with no clear winner going in…Perry and Cain make an agreement to team up…Mittens teams up with Santorum (Ichh!) and narrowly wins on the sixteenth ballot…Perry/Cain decides to run a third party ticket and the rest is predictable from there…Obama gets a second term and the Tea party fades out of existence while the Koch brothers face criminal charges from the Obama Justice department…

                    Hey, when I dream…I dream big.

                     

    1. When Jobs finally relented, he did not hold back. He told Obama that the United States needed to become more business-friendly if it did not want to lose its edge. He talked about how much easier it was to build a factory in China than in the U.S., where there were too many regulations and needless costs. And he complained about the U.S. education system, saying unions protected bad teachers and kept principals from hiring good ones.

      The Obama policy and administration failures are clear as a bell

      1. Or are you finding blurbs that fit your preconceived notion of who Jobs was and extrapolating what his politics must have been from there?  Jobs wasn’t as business savvy as people attributed him to be. Aesthetics and marketing were where his genius lay. I don’t doubt he said those things to Obama. I also don’t doubt that he was getting that info from his Board. Jobs’ expertise wasn’t in weighing pros and cons of where the factories were. He hated that shit.

        Try doing more than simple google searches. Try reading an entire book before you decide how a dead man felt or didn’t feel about this or any president.  

      1. Isaacson was contacted by Jobs about 7 years ago when he had already been diagnosed with cancer, to help write his biography. Jobs gave something like 50 taped interviews–great segment on this on 60 Minutes last Sunday.

        Jobs held his last interview with Isaacson right before he died and they talked about how it might not be flattering. Jobs basically said, “So be it. Don’t sugar coat it. Just tell the truth.” So, this had his full blessing, start to finish.

        Here’s the link to Part one from Sunday. Pretty fascinating interview with Walter Isaacson.  

        1. It still seems tacky, but less offensive after your explanation (and Ari and BlueCat). I tend to think that whether the person consented or not, it’s in bad taste to cash in on a death.  

          1. That he wanted the biography published after his death because he wanted his kids to have a way of knowing him in a way they couldn’t during his life?

            I don’t have the source at hand, but there was a piece recently that quoted him as saying he did the interviews and authorized the biography because he wanted his kids to understand the choices he made and why he wasn’t always there for them. Probably conversations he did not want to have in the last months of his life–so the biography is his voice to them after death, and getting to cash in is the biographer’s reward for spending 7 years helping him give them that last gift.

      2. sooner rather than later becaue they knew time was short for getting Job’s own account, sxp.  Nothing scandolous or disrespectful here. The hope was that Jobs would still be alive when it came out and Jobs even said there would probably be things in it he wouldn’t like and that he would wait a year before reading it.    

  5. Oakland, CA police ousted the Occupy Oakland protesters this morning at about 4:30am, initiating contact with the protesters by firing off flashbang grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets and reportedly sonic cannon.  I haven’t seen any reports of protesters acting in any way that would dictate this level of force, and having seen the level of restraint used by CSP and DPD the other week here in Denver, I can only say that this seems to be a clear case of police abuse of power.

    A protest curfew was put in place by Oakland today of 10pm – which apparently meant 10pm Eastern, because police once again assaulted Occupy Oakland just after 7pm local time.  Once again, they have resorted to tear gas and rubber bullets without any apparent provocation.  Local reporters have had tear gas canisters fired at them, and live video feeds are getting cut with alarming regularity.

    Police have attempted to deny using tear gas and rubber bullets, and have accused protesters of using the same, but local media is now confronting them on their blatant lies; I guess it’s hard to keep a lie like that going in the face of photo and video evidence.

    Oh – and apparently OPD is under an ongoing Federal agreement to not fire tear gas or rubber bullets at protesters.  That seems to be holding them back a whole lot.  Yup.

    Occupy Everywhere!

    1. There’s an iconic image beginning to circulate of a Navy sailor standing in front of the police line, holding a Veterans for Peace flag and a copy of the Constitution.

      Which is all well and good, except that when the police decide to disperse the crowd with flashbang grenades and tear gas, one of the guys that gets gassed – and I mean the police lob the canister directly at him – is the veteran who, having served his country, is protesting peacefully…

      about 1 minute in, the guy with the flag very close to the police line on the left side of the video…

    2. Oakland, Orlando, Albuquerque, Baltimore all getting police escorts off their encampments tonight.

      On the other hand, the Occupy movements are apparently continuing to do a decent job at smoking out infiltrators.  OWS caught on film a conservative blogger giving out bongs and Che rolling papers in an attempt to misportray the movement (the OWS videographer says “why don’t you hand out thermals – we could use those”).  And Occupy Minnesota protesters found a box of rocks cleverly marked “riot equipment” planted in their encampment.  I guess when conservative activists get desperate, they’ll do anything – to discredit their opponents.

      1. Used to be, SWAT practices were used only for barricaded hostage takers and shootouts. Now they’re SOP for our increasingly militaristic police in nearly every situtaion. Next: routine tail light traffic stops? Dog walking without a leash? Parking meter lapses? Tasers and teargas for all!

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