{"id":9486,"date":"2012-11-16T09:32:57","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T17:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=9486"},"modified":"2012-11-16T09:32:57","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T17:32:57","slug":"open-thread11162012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/16\/open-thread11162012\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread&ndash;11\/16\/2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">For once everything here seems to be moving along smoothly.&#160; I\u2019m current with replies.&#160; Tomorrow appears routine.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Today\u2019s took me 3:49 (average 4:48).&#160; To do it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jigzone.com\/puzzles\/2012-11-16-CE2504A965A9\" target=\"_blank\">click here<\/a>.&#160; How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/front.moveon.org\/why-gay-men-are-doing-you-a-favor-by-being-attracted-to-each-other-and-not-your-girlfriend\/\" target=\"_blank\">MoveOn<\/a>: <\/font>Why Gay Men Are Doing You A Favor By Being Attracted To Each Other, And Not Your Girlfriend<\/p>\n<p>&#160;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"338\" src=\"http:\/\/www.collegehumor.com\/e\/6846855\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"600\" target=\"_blank\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"webkitallowfullscreen\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; width: 600px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 5px\">\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.collegehumor.com\/videos\/most-viewed\/this-year\" target=\"_blank\">CollegeHumor&#8217;s Favorite Funny Videos<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Dang! This could lead to Bubba Teabuggering Bubba, &#8217;cause the gays have all the gals! Yuck! \ud83d\ude09<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/dogwoodinitiative.org\/blog\/harper-staged-conflicts\" target=\"_blank\">Dogwood Initiative<\/a>: <\/font>Later, the Tory lobbyist elaborated on Harper\u2019s vote counting approach, saying that since he became Prime Minister in 2006 Harper has orchestrated \u201cstaged conflicts\u201d to advance his agenda. From Harper\u2019s perspective, the lobbyist explained, he has won all these \u201cstaged conflicts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a follow up discussion a Tory insider elaborated on the Conservative\u2019s disregard for mainstream media, emphasizing they put much more energy into unfiltered communications streams, particularly segmented individual, e-mail and phone conversations to their base driven by a state-of-the-art constituency database. Harper and the Tories also prioritize local media, which publishes their narrative without fact checking or cynical analysis by pundits.<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">It sounds that the NDP needs to take lessons form the Obama campaign, because the Tories seem to have taken lessons from Republicans.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/11\/16\/opinion\/life-death-and-deficits.html\" target=\"_blank\">NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>Now, life expectancy at age 65 has risen, too. But the rise has been very uneven since the 1970s, with only the relatively affluent and well-educated seeing large gains. Bear in mind, too, that the full retirement age has already gone up to 66 and is scheduled to rise to 67 under current law. <\/p>\n<p>This means that any further rise in the retirement age would be a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who aren\u2019t living much longer, and who, in many cases, have jobs requiring physical effort that\u2019s difficult even for healthy seniors. And these are precisely the people who depend most on Social Security. <\/p>\n<p>So any rise in the Social Security retirement age would, as I said, be cruel, hurting the most vulnerable Americans. And this cruelty would be gratuitous: While the United States does have a long-run budget problem, Social Security is not a major factor in that problem. <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">I took this piece out of the middle of an excellent Paul Krugman editorial, so for your own benefit, please click through. Republicans like raising the retirement cage for Social Security, because it would insure that the rich get an even greater portion of the benefits. Instead raise the pay cap.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: inline\" title=\"16Cartoon\" alt=\"16Cartoon\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/16Cartoon.jpg\" width=\"650\" height=\"450\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For once everything here seems to be moving along smoothly.&#160; I\u2019m current with replies.&#160; Tomorrow appears routine. Jig Zone Puzzle: Today\u2019s took me 3:49 (average 4:48).&#160; To do it, click here.&#160; How did you do? Short Takes: From MoveOn: Why Gay Men Are Doing You A Favor By Being Attracted To Each Other, And Not <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/16\/open-thread11162012\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}