Cleveland Sports Forum

I never post here but dropped in briefly to see what' up. Since this is the Tribe Forum I remain uninterested in the political discussion but am glad to see you all remain committed to your causes. Enjoy the next eight months of political discussion. I'll see you in GameTime, General Discussion and Minor Matters.

Cali:

I would love to say that the fine people of Cleveland had a moral reason for dumping Dennis. Or even that they got sick of his tax and spend ways, which while he was the mayor of Cleveland led to debt defaults and the sale of the city's electric plant. But unfortunately he just got his butt kicked by the GOP in a political move.

The republican led congress re-drew his district before the last election, and it stretched 100 miles west of Cleveland into Toledo. Almost half of the new district belonged in Rep. Kaptur's old district, so she had a big advantage.

Ole Dennis had thought about possibly moving to Washington state to run for congress in a heavy democratic leading district there. He even flew to the state last year to look things over and think about it. In a shrewd move Rep. Kaptur used this to her advantage. She ran ads in the new district in Ohio comparing Kucinich to the Modell led Browns and Lebron. Willing to run out on the people there. "Looks like he's next in line to abandon us" the ad said.

She won easily, by over 20 points...

Hillbilly wrote:Cali:

I would love to say that the fine people of Cleveland had a moral reason for dumping Dennis. Or even that they got sick of his tax and spend ways, which while he was the mayor of Cleveland led to debt defaults and the sale of the city's electric plant. But unfortunately he just got his butt kicked by the GOP in a political move.

The republican led congress re-drew his district before the last election, and it stretched 100 miles west of Cleveland into Toledo. Almost half of the new district belonged in Rep. Kaptur's old district, so she had a big advantage.

Ole Dennis had thought about possibly moving to Washington state to run for congress in a heavy democratic leading district there. He even flew to the state last year to look things over and think about it. In a shrewd move Rep. Kaptur used this to her advantage. She ran ads in the new district in Ohio comparing Kucinich to the Modell led Browns and Lebron. Willing to run out on the people there. "Looks like he's next in line to abandon us" the ad said.

She won easily, by over 20 points...

What a great stragety, and what a stupid guy. He gives Dennis' a bad name.

Getting back to my Obama-bashin' ...

I haven't heard it talked about alot, which peeves me off, but our countries budget deficit for the month of February was 229 billion .... with a b .... for 1 month.

That is larger then the entire deficit for the entire year of 2007.

42 cents of every dollar our nation is currently spending is borrowed.

How long can we last?

Uncle Dennis, it must be mentioned that Hillbilly has previously expressed at least a little soft spot for Dennis Kucinich for being a straight shooter. I can't say I disagree.

I hate the spin that this story is taking in Cleveland that Kucinich was defeated by big bad Republicans who re-drew the district lines so one Democrat could defeat another.

That line redistricting is happening all over the nation, and in large states like California with Democrats in control, the redistricting is to their strong favor.

I currently live in one of the few swing little areas of Bay Area voting. Our district was ridiculously re-drawn leaving our most recent Congressman who lives about 10 blocks from me to decide to move 50 miles to the decaying town of Stockton to try to keep a Congressional seat of some sort.

On all this redistricting across the nation, Democrats have been the primary power holders.

Reno windmills not living up to manufacturers' claims
$1 million project funded by stimulus has saved $2,785 since 2010 installation

7:45 PM, Mar. 14, 2012 |



Nearly two years after Reno started installing energy-producing windmills at city facilities from downtown to Stead, some have proven to be better at generating electricity than others despite claims made by manufacturers.

The city’s seven windmills have so far saved Reno $2,785 in energy costs after generating 25,319 kilowatt-hours of electricity. The windmills were installed between April and October 2010 and cost about $1 million out of a $2.1 million federal energy grant given to the city that was part of the stimulus package approved by Congress in February 2009.

That’s according to data available on Reno’s new “open government” website that tracks the amount of power each windmill generates and the average wind speed from each day.

The most successful of Reno’s six operational windmills is located at the city’s water sewer facility in Stead. It features two white blades and has generated 11 megawatt-hours over the last 365 days with an average wind speed of 2.3 miles per hour. Before it was constructed in October 2010, it was expected to generate 10.5 megawatt-hours, according to its Scotland-based manufacturer, Gaia-Wind.


http://www.rgj.com/article/20120314/NEW ... |FRONTPAGE

UN rights council delves into US voter I.D. laws

By Eric Shawn Fox News

Published March 14, 2012

The controversy over requiring voters to provide photo IDs has reached the world stage.

The United Nations Human Rights Council is investigating the issue of American election laws at its gathering on minority rights in Geneva, Switzerland.. This, despite the fact that some members of the council have only in the past several years allowed women to vote, and one member, Saudi Arabia, still bars women from the voting booth completely.

Officials from the NAACP are presenting their case against U.S. voter ID laws, arguing to the international diplomats that the requirements disenfranchise voters and suppress the minority vote.

Eight states have passed voter ID laws in the past year, voter ID proposals are pending in 32 states and the Obama administration has recently moved to block South Carolina and Texas from enacting their voter ID measures.

"This really is a tactic that undercuts the growth of your democracy," said Hillary Shelton, the NAACP's senior vice president for advocacy, about voter photo ID requirements.

In a Fox News interview prior to his trip, Shelton said the message from the NAACP delegation to the Human Rights Council is that the photo ID law "undercuts the integrity of our government, if you allow it to happen. It's trickery, it's a sleight-of-hand. We're seeing it happen here and we don't want it to happen to you, and we are utilizing the U.N. as a tool to make sure that we are able to share that with those countries all over the world."

The United Nations has no legal jurisdiction over the American electoral system, which Shelton acknowledges. Asked whether he thinks that the U.N. should be involved in domestic American laws, he answered, "No, not specifically. The U.N. should certainly be involved in sharing a best practice for the world."

"We're the greatest country on the face of the earth, but we can be better still," he said.

The NAACP had scheduled two American citizens to present their claims at the U.N. panel who, the group says, worry they will be disenfranchised by the requirement to present a photo ID to vote. The civil rights group says one, Kemba Smith Pradia, was convicted of a drug-related offense and is concerned that if she moves back to Virginia from the Midwest, state law will block her voting because of her record, even though she was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton.

A second American, Austin Alex, is a Texas Christian University student. The NAACP says he is worried that he will be barred from voting because he only holds an out-of-state driver's license and a non-government student ID, not a Texas issued photo ID.

But supporters of photo ID requirements argue that states provide such identifications for free, and in some cases, voters can cast provisional or absentee ballots that do not even require a photo ID. The NAACP disputes those claims.

In 2008, the United States Supreme Court upheld the voter photo ID law enacted in Indiana.

The U.N. Human Rights Council members include communist China and Cuba. In addition, several Arab nations are on the council that have only granted the right to vote to women in recent years, such as Kuwait in 2005 and Qatar in 2003. Women in the Republic of Moldova have had the right to vote for less than 20 years.

Council member Saudi Arabia announced six months ago that women will be granted the right to vote, but that change does not go into effect until 2015.

"The idea that this is a human rights abuse is ridiculous," said Hans von Spakovsky, a voter fraud expert and senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, in Washington, D.C.

"The UN allowing this to take place under their roof makes them, unfortunately, complicit in what really is a publicity stunt by the NAACP, and I think it wastes their time, when they should be going after real and sustained human rights abuses like the things going on in horrible places, like North Korea."

Spakovsky, who supports voter photo ID laws, says it is a hypocritical and meaningless waste of time to present a case against American electoral laws at the UN forum.

"I think the leadership of the NAACP is, quite frankly, doing a disservice to American citizens and the democracy that we have here, by going abroad to the Human Rights Council, which is filled with dictatorships and other countries that actually and really abuse human rights."

He called the council's weighing of U.S. laws "an insult to the United States that the NAACP thinks we should be getting advice from those kinds of countries, which are not democracies, on how to administer elections in this country.”

But Shelton argues that the NAACP's presence at the Geneva conference can teach other nations how to improve their electoral systems.

"We can learn a lot from those who haven't gone through as much as we have," he said.

"Everyone has a different struggle, but there's lessons to learn from whoever we come across ... but there's also some things I think we can still help teach the rest of the world."

'Obamacare' to cost twice as much, new CBO report says

Published March 14, 2012 | FoxNews.com

The Congressional Budget Office has extended its cost estimates for President Obama's health care law out to 2022, taking in more years of full implementation, and showing that the bill is substantially more expensive -- twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.

In a largely overlooked segment of the CBO's update to the budget outlook released Tuesday, the independent arm of Congress found that the bill will cost $1.76 trillion between now and 2022.

That only counts the cost of coverage, not implementation costs and other changes.

"The bill spends more than the president promised, it covers fewer people -- probably 2 million fewer people -- and it taxes more than was expected," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.

The first estimates of the cost of the health care bill included three years before the bill even took effect, so there was little or no spending, making the full 10 years look less expensive. Sessions notes that the $1.76 trillion estimate includes only the costs of coverage, not implementation and other costs. He argues that all those drive the price up even further over the first full 10 years of the law.

"The full accounting of the bill is $2.6 trillion. That's a fair and accurate analysis of what the bill would cost, according to CBO," Sessions said, noting how the cost dwarfs the fight over the 10-year debt reduction plan debated last year.

"We spent a whole summer fighting over a way to reduce spending by $2.1 trillion and here this bill is going add $2.6 trillion more in spending."

Budget watchdogs note that before the bill passed into law, Republicans warned the price tag was bound to go up -- since the expenditures and receipts covered different time periods.

"Spending doesn't begin until 2014, and so you got to count a couple of years where nothing was going on," said Doug Holtz-Eakin, director of Committee for a Responsible Budget. "If you have a big spending program and you count 10 years of it instead of eight years, you get a much bigger number, which is what we've done. ...

"Now those years are steadily going into the rearview mirror and what we're instead (at) are years where it's fully implemented," Holtz-Eakin continued. "The Affordable Care Act is going to cost a lot of money."

But one Democratic lawmaker says competition will lower costs.

"There are no public options. There's no big new government health plan being offered. It's all private sector options, and we hope they compete against each other to get prices down," said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.

As expensive as it is, the CBO predicts the law will actually reduce the deficit because it increases the income from a range of tax increases and penalties on individuals, employers and insurance companies -- by $81 billion more than last year's projection.

"Over the 10-year period from 2012 through 2021, enactment of the coverage provisions of the ACA was projected last March to increase federal deficits by $1,131 billion, whereas the March 2012 estimate indicates that those provisions will increase deficits by $1,083 billion," the report reads.

The CBO model also assumes that between 3 million and 5 million people will lose health care coverage from their employers and there will be 1 million to 2 million more people who won't qualify for the exchanges but will go on Medicaid instead. In all, some 30 million people will remain without health coverage, according to the estimate.

CBO notes that it bases its new projections in part on both a slower recovery and a smaller than estimated growth in health care costs over the past year as well as legislative fixes over the past year.

Sessions noted that the study projects spending in accordance with the law will add at least $700 billion to the deficit in the years 2010 to 2019 -- its first 10 years of enactment.

"Sadly, it may prove much worse than that," he said.

Fox News' Jim Angle contributed to this report.

I called into our automated jury summons system earlier this evening and learned I am required to report to a local "Hall of Justice" in the Superior Court of California on March 21 at 8AM. 8 1/2 hours from now.

I'm pissed.

I was a legal voting resident of Illinois, Ohio, Florida and South Carolina for a combined 28 years and received not one summons.

I haven't clocked them, but I know the Superior Court of California has sent me at least 10 in the 11 years I have lived here, and I seem to recall getting summoned to other courts.

My wife gets one every year.

And so have my California kids after the age of 18, though they have been forgiven due to out of state college attendance (and now my daughter is a legal resident of Florida).

In February 2010 I lost a week's worth of income serving on a jury deciding the medical damages of a Berkeley drop out who testified she knew the car in front of her was likely to turn, but still found her bike in the path of the turn.

I think I ranted at that time that I walked into the jury pool room at 8AM on the morning of summons and saw maybe 300 people. At least 200. Not that I was looking to count, but it hit me square that I was in downtown Oakland CA with multiple hundreds of eligible jurors, and I was seeing a starkly white complected room. Oakland CA is over 35% African American, and our county is 18%+. Bored with the wait before being "honored" with selection as Juror Number One, I walked the room and spotted four people who might have been African American. 90%+ were Caucasian or Asian American. Few Hispanics.

I think I also ranted here that perhaps the requirement of "no felony convictions" affected the jury pool.

Pissed to realize I have to report tomorrow AM, I barely scratched the surface of research and found an ACLU.......yes, ACLU......study that my county has a disproportionate number of White and Asian jurors in each jury pool because a huge % of African Americans and Hispanics just do not respond to the summons.

The report mentions that with regard to demographics in the county, 100% of Caucasians report, and actually over 100% of Asian Americans report.

And of late 2010, the County had no enforcement policy for jury no shows.

Here's the link to a light read on the topic in the San Francisco Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1GHBGO.DTL

Here's the actual ACLU report:

http://www.aclunc.org/docs/racial_justi ... _pools.pdf

Lawyers complain regularly that their non-white clients who go to trial cannot get a jury reflecting their ethnicity.


If called for jury box evaluation, I may bring this up with the judge.

(though I did just watch the episode of "Big Bang Theory" where Sheldon had to do jail time for disagreement in traffic court)

Happy to report I'm not in jail, nor do I have to serve on a jury.

I was in the bottom 25 percentile for the first time in my life. I escaped three pollings for jury pools, then was excused for two hours with instructions to report back at 1:30 just in case I might be needed. I twiddled my iPhone for 3 1/2 hours, and then was dismissed at 5PM with credit for jury duty that gets me out of it for the next 12 months in California.....if I'm still here.

Santorum is out.

About time

No more uncle grumpy

Hillbilly wrote:About time

No more uncle grumpy

Hey, simmer down on uncles!

I would take all of Uncle Dennis that we could get, but I saw enough of uncle grumpy.

I just think having a guy like him out front of the conservative movement is bad for the movement. People look at him and might think, well, if living a Christian life makes one that sad then forget it. Or if living fiscally conservative makes one that grumpy then heck with it, I am going to the mall with my Visa.

Hillbilly wrote: Or if living fiscally conservative makes one that grumpy then heck with it, I am going to the mall with my Visa.

Sounds like an immigration dig, to me.....