The average distance between stars in the universe is approximately 4,150 light-years.
One more little gem from our chronically and embarrassingly broken campaign finance disclosure system. The laws as currently written allow super PACs to wait to accept all their cash until the final stages of the campaign and thereby avoid disclosing its donors until after the election is over. So no contributions accepted until the very end, and then a last-minute ad blitz that no one is accountable for until it’s too late. We have specific examples of this practice in Ohio and in Montana/North Dakota.
Interesting graphic showing the location of the Sandy-related deaths on Staten Island and the evacuation zone.
Romney on House Republicans: “You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress. He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy.”
Among these many remarkable stats about Sandy, the fact that the second highest wave height associated with the storm — 32.5 feet — was recorded right outside New York Harbor is the hardest to fathom.
Pay close attention to this, because it speaks directly to how Congressional Republicans’ destructive legislative strategy in 2011 and Mitt Romney’s last minute shuffle to the center are actually a singular strategy.
Mitt Romney’s final pitch to voters is that an Obama victory assures another debt limit standoff — eliding, for obvious reasons, that the debt limit standoff in 2011 was a Republican contrivance, and a debt limit standoff in 2013 will be a Republican contrivance as well. Elect him, he says, and the crisis won’t happen.
On the surface that seems tragically plausible. Read More
The White House releases its closing argument in an infographic … Read More
Some of the most harrowing tales out of post-Sandy New York come from the big hospitals that first lost power then lost their backup generators, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of patients. Photos of that struggle.
Let me start this post by stipulating that I am one of those only minorly inconvenienced by Hurricane Sandy. Family is safe. No property destroyed. Really the entirety of it for me is that my apartment and office have been without electricity since Monday evening. A pretty big hassle in the context of workaday life but trivial in comparison to what people are dealing with in the flooded parts of New York City and New Jersey. Read More