In the week leading up to Mother’s Day this past Sunday, Rush Limbaugh, the bombastic radio host, interspersed his program with in-show advertisements for ProFlowers. However, on his May 5th show, Limbaugh exhorted his listeners to buy Mother’s Day roses not just for their mothers, but “mistress[es]” as well:
LIMBAUGH: Mother’s Day coming up Sunday. Make sure the mother in your life, the mom, mother-in-law, wife, girlfriend, mistress, whatever, knows how much you care about her. And how thankful you are to have her. It’s one of these holidays they have the expectation, it’s there. It just is.
Watch it:
Limbaugh’s advice hasn’t exactly fallen on deaf ears among conservatives. It would be an understatement to say that Republicans have had a mistress problem of late. Indeed, in the past year alone, three Republicans in Congress – former Sen. John Ensign and former Reps. Chris Lee and Mark Souder – have resigned amidst sex scandals. Limbaugh himself remarried for the fourth time in June 2010.
The Memphis Grizzlies were never on TV until the start of their remarkable playoff run, so one of several things I didn’t really know about them is that they have a little used Iranian reserve center named Hamed Haddadi. And damn if he isn’t actually putting up excellent numbers in his limited minutes. This year he grabbed 2.2 rebounds and scored 2.4 points per game off 51.7 percent field goal shooting in his measly 5.4 minutes per game. Obviously, you can’t base much on such a small sample, but it at least suggests that if he were putting in a full 15-20 mpg stint as a backup he could perform well.
Seems to commit a ton of fouls, so it’s not really clear he could stay on the court longer than that. But the guys like Darrell Arthur and Hasheem Thabeet who Memphis is currently using as backup big men are really bad. Any reallocation of minutes at the margin to Haddadi is likely to make this team even more impressive.
Update
Sorry, Thabeet’s not even on the team anymore. All the more reason to play Haddadi.
As a sign of how extremist the party has become, the man who came in second in the GOP presidential primaries last time explains the party today would be all but certain to reject Reagan. Think Progress has the story (and video):
FT reports on Ivan Glasenberg’s meteoric rise to riches based on commodity trading: “Mr Glasenberg’s stake in Glencore could be valued at $10bn this month but he will be as vulnerable to a post-IPO descent as Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, whose wealth fell from $7.8bn that year to $2.5bn two years later, according to Forbes magazine.”
There seems to me to be an important life lesson here. If you ever find yourself with $7.8 billion in the bank, maybe just leave the casino on a high note? Surely that’s enough money. If you don’t just walk away, you find yourself vulnerable to the absurd situation of being the guy with a $2.5 billion fortune who’s being mocked in newspapers as a cautionary tale about poor financial management. Nobody needs that. Just walk away!
This morning in an interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, former Vice President Dick Cheney stridently defended Bush era torture programs, calling harsh interrogation tactics “the most important steps we took that kept us safe for 7 years.” He also advocated reinstating waterboarding, telling Wallace that enhanced interrogation “worked, and provided absolutely vital pieces of information.”
Cheney resurrected an old GOP talking point in insisting that waterboarding was not torture, despite testimony of people like CIA Director Leon Panetta to the contrary. “It was a good program, it was a legal program, it was not torture,” Cheney maintained. Watch it:
Many former Bush administration officials have falsely credited torture tactics with leading to the raid on Osama bin Laden, but Cheney went further by insisting that torture was the key policy that has kept the country safe for a decade after the September 11th attacks.
Cheney also echoed former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) and chastised Obama for “prosecuting” the intelligence officers who tortured detainees. “These men deserve to be decorated, they don’t deserve to be prosecuted,” he told Wallace, calling it “an outrage that we would go after the people who deserve the credit for keeping us safe for seven and a half years.” While the Obama administration in fact decided long ago not to prosecute any CIA agents involved in torture, Cheney nevertheless suggested Obama has been so relentless in going after those responsible that “these guys…have to look over their shoulder.”
Finally, Cheney had tough words for the Obama administration when it came to Libya. He smirked when Wallace mentioned the policy described as “leading from behind,” and admonished Obama for turning over operational control of the mission to NATO. He further tried to suggest weakness on the president’s part by telling Wallace, “the policy of the administration has been to hope for Gadaffi’s departure but not be prepared to do enough to make sure it happens.” Most gallingly, one week after Obama took decisive action to eliminate the world’s most notorious terrorist, Cheney said “it’s not clear to me that this administration is up to the task” of taking out Gadaffi.
Mary Beth Sheridan for the Washington Post reports that things are not looking up for the economies of Egypt and Tunisia:
The largely peaceful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have battered the countries’ economies. Tourism has collapsed; interest rates have jumped. Economic growth in the two countries is expected to plunge as much as four percentage points from last year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The squeeze comes as those nations’ interim governments are trying to create jobs to satisfy the young protesters’ demands.
One major worry I have about the revolutions in both those countries is that they were driven at some important level by popular anger over commodity price dynamics and fall-behind immiseration that the new governments won’t really be able to address. The US is apparently working out a debt relief package, which is nice and should buy some time, but meanwhile we’ve got sectarian riots.
In the last few months, conservatives in several states have moved to limit unemployment benefits, even with the national unemployment rate at 9 percent and more than 40 percent of the unemployed having been out of work for six months or more. Conservative lawmakers in Utah falsely claimed that cutting jobless benefits would be “motivation for people to get back to work,” while Michigan gutted its unemployment insurance system despite having one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.
Florida Republicans this weekend also succeeded in reducing their state’s unemployment benefits, sending a bill to Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) for his signature:
A bill that would establish some of the deepest and most far-reaching cuts in unemployment benefits in the nation is heading for the desk of Gov. Rick Scott…The legislation would cut maximum state benefits to 23 weeks from 26 when the jobless rate is 10.5 percent or higher. If lower, the maximum would decline on a sliding scale until bottoming at 12 weeks if the jobless rate was 5 percent or less.
As the National Employment Law Project pointed out, with this bill, Florida will “go further than any other state in dismantling its unemployment insurance system.” The Republican sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Nancy Detert (R), relied on the same false assumption as the lawmakers in Utah, saying that cutting benefits “encourages people to get back into the job market.” Research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits.
Even before this legislation, Florida’s benefits were amongst the stingiest in the nation. Once it becomes law, Floridians will not receive the national standard of 26 weeks of unemployment benefits unless the state’s unemployment rate, currently at 11.1 percent, tops 12 percent. As the Miami Herald pointed out, the bill also makes it “easier for companies to keep former workers from collecting benefits.”
Adding insult to injury, the money saved from cutting unemployment benefits will be used to reduce business taxes in a state where the corporate tax rate is already exceedingly low. Scott had been looking to cut corporate taxes even further, but was rebuffed by the legislature.
In the last few months, conservatives in several states have moved to limit unemployment benefits, even with the national unemployment rate at 9 percent and more than 40 percent of the unemployed having been out of work for six months or more. Conservative lawmakers in Utah falsely claimed that cutting jobless benefits would be “motivation for people to get back to work,” while Michigan gutted its unemployment insurance system despite having one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.
Florida Republicans this weekend also succeeded in reducing their state’s unemployment benefits, sending a bill to Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) for his signature:
A bill that would establish some of the deepest and most far-reaching cuts in unemployment benefits in the nation is heading for the desk of Gov. Rick Scott…The legislation would cut maximum state benefits to 23 weeks from 26 when the jobless rate is 10.5 percent or higher. If lower, the maximum would decline on a sliding scale until bottoming at 12 weeks if the jobless rate was 5 percent or less.
As the National Employment Law Project pointed out, with this bill, Florida will “go further than any other state in dismantling its unemployment insurance system.” The Republican sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Nancy Detert (R), relied on the same false assumption as the lawmakers in Utah, saying that cutting benefits “encourages people to get back into the job market.” Research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits.
Even before this legislation, Florida’s benefits were amongst the stingiest in the nation. Once it becomes law, Floridians will not receive the national standard of 26 weeks of unemployment benefits unless the state’s unemployment rate, currently at 11.1 percent, tops 12 percent. As the Miami Herald pointed out, the bill also makes it “easier for companies to keep former workers from collecting benefits.”
Adding insult to injury, the money saved from cutting unemployment benefits will be used to reduce business taxes in a state where the corporate tax rate is already exceedingly low. Scott had been looking to cut corporate taxes even further, but was rebuffed by the legislature.
Matt Richtel’s NYT story about San Francisco’s innovative SF Park initiative worries me that it might mislead some people. He focuses heavily on the use of smartphone aps to help inform people about where vacant spots are. That’s a neat idea, but the core of the initiative is the use of better pricing schemes so as to allocate the spaces efficiently:
Parking will also frequently cost less. SFpark will adjust meter prices based on demand to encourage drivers to make trips in off-peak hours and to use parking lots and garages. While high-demand spaces will gradually go up in price, other spaces will decrease in cost.
As meter and garage pricing shifts to increase availability, instead of some blocks being full and others empty, the goal is to have, on average, at least one parking space available on every block. Once a space is found, longer time limits and new meters that accept credit and debit cards will make it easier to avoid parking tickets.
The high-tech stuff is park of making this user friendly, but the key “technology” being deployed is the idea that parking spaces should be allocated via supply and demand rather than via the central planning, rationing (park here cheaply, but only for an hour!), queueing (circle the block!), and other Soviet methods typically used in American parking policy.
After all my NIMBY-bashing, I don’t really want to be “that guy” but am I crazy to be somewhat alarmed that they’re trying to import more honeybees into my neighborhood? I don’t want to get stung! Hoisted on my own petard, I guess, so I won’t complain.
In the week leading up to Mother’s Day this past Sunday, Rush Limbaugh, the bombastic radio host, interspersed his program with in-show advertisements for ProFlowers. However, on his May 5th show, Limbaugh exhorted his listeners to buy Mother’s Day roses not just for their mothers, but “mistress[es]” as well:
In the last few months, conservatives 
