(How do you lip-sync a trumpet?)
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For the first time in a generation, Republicans are preparing for the possibility that their presidential nomination could be decided at their national convention rather than on the campaign trail, a prospect that would upend one of the rituals of modern politics.Unlike previous contests where the also-rans either got out early and then supported the inevitable nominee before the convention or conceded gracefully and stood on the stage with them as the balloons dropped, neither Rick Santorum nor Newt Gingrich will go gently. They've made it pretty clear that they both despise Mitt Romney and their goal has become less about winning the nomination than it is denying it to Mr. Romney.
The race remains Mitt Romney’s to lose, and if he continues to accumulate delegates at a steady clip starting with contests in Puerto Rico on Sunday and Illinois on Tuesday, he can still amass the 1,144 necessary to secure the nomination before the last primary, in Utah on June 26.
But as he struggles to win the hearts of conservative voters and hold off a challenge from Rick Santorum, party leaders, activists and the campaigns are for the first time taking seriously the possibility that neither he nor anyone else will get to that total.
In that case, the nomination would be decided by the more than 2,200 delegates — from obscure local officials and activists to national figures — who will attend the party’s convention in Tampa, Fla., in late August.
They would embark on an unscripted, contentious and televised drama that has not played out in 36 years, a period in which both major party conventions have become slickly produced and highly choreographed pep rallies kicking off the general election campaign.
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Can such a system work? It’s already working! Massachusetts enacted a very similar reform six years ago — yes, while Mitt Romney was governor. Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who played a key role in developing both the local and the national reforms (and has published an illustrated guide to reform) has surveyed the results — and finds that Romneycare is working pretty much as advertised. The number of people without insurance has dropped sharply, the quality of care hasn’t suffered, and the program’s cost has been very close to initial projections.That's going to become a major part of the campaign -- the making stuff up part -- because a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office shows that the estimates of the cost of healthcare reform will be less than projected. And we can't have the inconvenient facts get in the way of a good campaign, now can we?
Oh, and the budgetary cost per newly insured resident of Massachusetts was actually lower than the projected cost per American insured by the Affordable Care Act.
Given this evidence, what’s a virulent opponent of reform to do? The answer is, make stuff up.
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As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them “suspicious.” That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.Bonus: Leonard Pitts writes about the Martin case.
That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the cross-hairs of someone who crosses the line.
The racial sensitivity of this case is heavy. Trayvon’s parents have said their son was murdered. Crump, the family’s lawyer, told me, “You know, if Trayvon would have been the triggerman, it’s nothing Trayvon Martin could have said to keep police from arresting him Day 1, Hour 1.” Even the police chief recognizes this reality, even while disputing claims of racial bias in the investigation: “Our investigation is color blind and based on the facts and circumstances, not color. I know I can say that until I am blue in the face, but, as a white man in a uniform, I know it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”
Zimmerman has not released a statement, but his father delivered a one-page letter to The Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. According to the newspaper, the statement said that Zimmerman is “Hispanic and grew up in a multiracial family.” The paper quotes the letter as reading, “He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever” and continues, “The media portrayal of George as a racist could not be further from the truth.” And disclosures made since the shooting complicate people’s perception of fairness in the case.
[...]
Although we must wait to get the results from all the investigations into Trayvon’s killing, it is clear that it is a tragedy. If no wrongdoing of any sort is ascribed to the incident, it will be an even greater tragedy.
One of the witnesses was a 13-year-old black boy who recorded a video for The Orlando Sentinel recounting what he saw. The boy is wearing a striped polo shirt, holding a microphone, speaking low and deliberately and has the heavy look of worry and sadness in his eyes. He describes hearing screaming, seeing someone on the ground and hearing gunshots. The video ends with the boy saying, “I just think that sometimes people get stereotyped, and I fit into the stereotype as the person who got shot.”
And that is the burden of black boys, and this case can either ease or exacerbate it.
If he had even once said that he was presenting a polemic, a metaphor, a dramatization, an "inspired by real events" monologue rather than real "facts," no one could ever have complained. Do we care whether Harriet Beecher Stowe ever saw runaway slaves jumping on ice floes as they fled across a river? (Stowe described Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "series of sketches" conveying the cruelty of slavery.) Do we care whether Upton Sinclair had actually seen the packinghouse cruelties he described in The Jungle? Whether any family exactly like the Joads was known to John Steinbeck -- or exactly like George Bailey's or Mr. Potter to Frank Capra for It's a Wonderful Life? Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist? You get the point. Mike Daisey could have had 98% of the intellectual/social impact of his monologue, and zero % of the dishonesty and now disgrace, if he had described it as an attempt to convey the truth of a situation through imagined details.Long Distance Driving -- 200,000 miles on an odometer is no longer unusual.
In the 1960s and ’70s, when odometers typically registered no more than 99,999 miles before returning to all zeros, the idea of keeping a car for more than 100,000 miles was the automotive equivalent of driving on thin ice. You could try it, but you’d better be prepared to swim.[Photo of the odometer on my 1988 Pontiac in January 2009.]
But today, as more owners drive their vehicles farther, some are learning that the imagined limits of vehicular endurance may not be real limits at all. Several factors have aligned to make pushing a car farther much more realistic.
Cars that have survived for a million miles or more have been widely documented, of course, but those tend to be exceptional cases. What’s different, and far more common, today are the online classified ads offering secondhand Hondas, Toyotas and Volvos with 150,000 or 200,000 miles — or more — not as parts donors but as vehicles with some useful life left.
One driver who has firsthand experience with this new paradigm of durability is Mark Webber, a 57-year-old Porsche salesman.
Mr. Webber has a full grasp of powerful new sports cars — in January he was in Southern California for sales training and track time with the 2013 Porsche 911 — but for his 35-mile commute to Herb Chambers Porsche in Boston, from Scituate, Mass., he drives a 1990 Volvo 740 with over 300,000 miles.
“I just can’t see the point of spending a lot of money driving a newer, racier car every day in city traffic when my old Volvo just wants to keep on going,” Mr. Webber said. “I guess you could say I’m just a New England tightwad.”
In Mr. Webber’s case, the enabler of his thrift may be global competition — and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Customer satisfaction surveys show cars having fewer and fewer problems with each passing year. Much of this improvement is a result of intense global competition — a carmaker simply can’t allow its products to leak oil, break down or wear out prematurely.
But another, less obvious factor has been the government-mandated push for lower emissions.
“The California Air Resources Board and the E.P.A. have been very focused on making sure that catalytic converters perform within 96 percent of their original capability at 100,000 miles,” said Jagadish Sorab, technical leader for engine design at Ford Motor. “Because of this, we needed to reduce the amount of oil being used by the engine to reduce the oil reaching the catalysts.
“Fifteen years ago, piston rings would show perhaps 50 microns of wear over the useful life of a vehicle,” Mr. Sorab said, referring to the engine part responsible for sealing combustion in the cylinder. “Today, it is less than 10 microns. As a benchmark, a human hair is 200 microns thick.
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The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws. While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum Administration.I am not the only one, I hope, that finds it ironic that the candidate who proudly proclaims his righteousness as embedded in the teachings of the Catholic Church as the one to be against child molestation.
I proudly support the efforts of the War on Illegal Pornography Coalition that has tirelessly fought to get federal obscenity laws enforced. That coalition is composed of 120 national, state, and local groups, including Morality in Media, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Cornerstone Family Council of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania Family Institute, Concerned Women for America, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a host of other groups. Together we will prevail.
Mississippi is a book by William Faulkner that somehow turned into a dumb reality show called Haley Barbour and Other Comical Racist White Villains With Dumb Accents vs. Poor Black People Forever. And ever since the nation’s poorest, most obese and reliably Republican-voting state got Internet access last year, the main thing the people of Mississippi have been looking for, on the ‘puter, is “free gay porn” and “God.” In that order.
Florida, as you can see and as can be expected, surpassed Mississippi in overall searches-by-state for Free Gay Porn, but failed to top Haley Barbour’s state in the essential “post-jacking off” search for God. (In Florida, that secondary search is “Kill Castro.”)
This website called Calamities of Nature produced a wonderful chart that everybody should hang up on the wall in Mississippi, based on Google search data.
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He didn’t ask if you were gay. He asked if you were homosexual. There's a difference. Being gay means you like men. Being homosexual means you like men but you’re up to no good.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 Monday to endorse a controversial bill that would allow Arizona employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for contraceptives based on religious objections.I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with religious freedom, moral objections, or the rights of an employer to pay or not pay for certain kinds of insurance, mandated or otherwise. (I especially like the part about not living in the Soviet Union as justification for an employer to have dictatorial oversight to an employee's medical history. When it's the state doing it, it's Communism, but when it's a company, it's the free market capitalism at its finest. Irony is lost on this person.) None of it -- not the invasive sonograms, the 24-hour waiting periods, the parental notifications -- is based on medical concerns or the right of a patient to know about a procedure. It is simply that the people who are writing and passing these laws are control freaks who are obsessed with the private lives and morals of everyone else.
Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”
Lesko said this bill responds to a contraceptive mandate in the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law March 2010.
“My whole legislation is about our First Amendment rights and freedom of religion,” Lesko said. “All my bill does is that an employer can opt out of the mandate if they have any religious objections.”
Glendale resident Liza Love said the bill would impose on women’s rights to keep their medical records private.
Love spoke to the committee about her struggle with polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis, conditions requiring her to use birth control.
“I wouldn’t mind showing my employer my medical records,” Love said. “But there are 10 women behind me that would be ashamed to do so.”
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While producers of existing shows attempt to read between the lines of networks' machinations, fans of these shows have little opportunity for input. Sure, you can write a letter, but the odds are it will be ignored.Hey, it's worked before; that's how they got the the original Star Trek back on the air in 1967. But somehow I don't think there's a huge groundswell for Harry's Law, despite the fact that Kathy Bates is great in it. It's a Cincinnati-based version of Boston Legal, and that was a niche show, too. It's too late for the new iteration of Prime Suspect (dammit), and most of the shows I like are on cable (In Plain Sight, Southland, Rizzoli & Isles, and Covert Affairs).
Another way to make your voice heard: Vote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's annual "Keep or Cancel?" poll, which allows viewers to register their compliments and complaints about prime-time television. The voting booth is now open at post-gazette.com/tv.
The 2011-12 TV season has had few breakout hits, especially among scripted shows. NBC's The Voice is a reality hit, but with only a few scripted exceptions -- Fox's New Girl, ABC's Suburgatory, CBS's 2 Broke Girls -- success stories have been few. This means there are a lot of shows that are "on the bubble," in TV parlance. Viewer support in a poll might not turn the tide, but at least you will feel better having cast a ballot for a favorite.
One vote per computer will be accepted. Series receiving an inordinate, unbelievable number of votes will be disqualified. Votes will be tallied through April 22, and shortly thereafter the results will be published in a column. We will send the results to each broadcast network president before the week of May 13, when the networks announce their new fall schedules.
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Rick Santorum captured twin victories in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday, overcoming the financial advantages of Mitt Romney and the Southern allegiances to Newt Gingrich on a night that amplified his argument that the Republican nominating fight is becoming a two-man race with Mr. Romney.This has the makings of a real donnybrook all the way to Tampa in September. Unless Mr. Romney can win every delegate from now on out or pull off some deals behind the scenes ("How does Secretary of State Newt Gingrich sound?"), he does not have a lock on the nomination, and the fight will go on. I still think Mr. Romney will somehow pull it off because the fates are not that friendly to me to grant my wish that they pick someone other than the Great Inevitable. If they were, I'd be buying a carload of lottery tickets and booking a room for the Pulitzer Prize ceremony.
The triumphs by Mr. Santorum elevated and strengthened his candidacy as the Republican campaign rolls ahead into a state-by-state battle for delegates. An aggressive push by Mr. Romney to try and capitalize on the divided conservative electorate failed to take hold, and he finished third in both states.
“We did it again,” Mr. Santorum said, addressing jubilant supporters in Louisiana, which holds its Republican primary next week. “The time is now for conservatives to pull together.”
A week after Super Tuesday cemented the status of Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum as the leading Republican candidates, the outcome of the Alabama and Mississippi primaries strengthened Mr. Santorum’s argument that he should emerge as the final competitor to Mr. Romney. But Mr. Gingrich, who finished a close second in both states, noted that he earned about as many delegates as his rivals. He pledged to take his candidacy to the Republican convention in August.
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TORONTO — Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney has cancelled an April appearance in Toronto citing concerns Canada is too dangerous.Yeah, some hoser might sneak up on him and yell "Boo!"
“He felt that in Canada the risk of violent protest was simply too high,” said Ryan Ruppert, president of promotions company Spectre Live Corp., which had booked Mr. Cheney for an April 24 appearance at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
“They specifically referenced what happened in Vancouver,” Mr, Ruppert added.
In September, Mr. Cheney was speaking at a private club in Vancouver when protesters massed outside the front door harassing ticket holders and in one instance, choking a security guard.
The former vice-president was reportedly held inside the building for more than seven hours as Vancouver Police in riot gear dispersed the demonstrators.
Cheney, who along with former President George W. Bush remains unpopular in Canada, had been slated to talk about his time in office and the current U.S. political landscape.
“God forbid there was ever an emergency,” said Ruppert, noting Cheney’s history of heart problems.
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