At Ohio River bridge, Obama calls out McConnell, Boehner on jobs describes Obama’s recent trip to highlight one of the bridges that he mentioned in his address to Congress about his jobs bill.

Speaking of the Brent Spence Bridge, Obama said the 48-year-old structure was “functionally obsolete.”

Local leaders have worked for more than 10 years to replace or repair the bridge. Current plans have a $2.4 billion price tag because they involve a 7.8-mile stretch of I-75 in the two states.

The bridge is a linchpin along the nation’s busiest freight corridor. About 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — or about $400 billion in goods — travels across it each year. But it was designed to carry 80,000 vehicles a day. Today, it carries about 170,000, Obama said.

There may be some who have trouble conceiving of the connection between infrastructure repair and job creation.  Imagine the impact on jobs if this bridge that carries about $400 billion in goods each year were to collapse due to lack of repairs.  I would think that spending $2.4 billion to repair or replace the bridge to make sure that the flow of good is not interrupted would have a very good return on investment.  That would seem to me a better investment than giving an equivalent amount of money to the wealthy “job creators” who would just turn around and park that money in US government bonds instead of creating and maintaining jobs.

The article Poll: Vast majority of Israelis would accept U.N. recognizing Palestine begins with the following:

Nearly 70 percent of Israelis surveyed recently said that Israel should accept a Palestinian state if the United Nations chooses to recognize it, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of The Jerusalem Post.

Contrary to the previous post, Obama U.N. speech sparks angry Palestinian protests, perhaps this one is a surprise to readers of this blog.

According to the Claude Shannon theory of information, this post with the surprise in it carries much more information than the one that is no surprise.  I am in the process of reading the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick where he explains Claude Shannon’s theories.

From the article Obama U.N. speech sparks angry Palestinian protests, comes the following first paragraph:

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Angry Palestinians on Thursday protested in the streets of Ramallah and Gaza after a UN speech by US President Barack Obama which was seen as unashamedly pro-Israel.

I can’t imagine that anybody is surprised by this. Just in case my imagination has failed me, for the one or two readers of this blog who might be surprised, I refer you back to the September 18, 2011 post Save the United States and Israel From Themselves.

I hope that the President has given careful thought to how the United States will respond to the inevitable backlash actions. Although, there is no evidence that President Obama has ever foreseen the consequences of his compromises with the Republicans.

This isn’t a new story, but I just stumbled across it. The article in The Lowell Sun is Helmet in hand during Lowell visit, Democratic front-runner Elizabeth Warren says she’s ready for Senate battle.

The Harvard law professor, who officially joined the race Wednesday as the Democratic front-runner, stopped by Xenith yesterday to tour the Lowell sports-helmet manufacturer. She toured the warehouse, shook hands with assembly-line workers, oohed and aahed over machines measuring impact on helmeted test dummies, and went home with a gifted football helmet.

I found the article interesting for a little bit of understanding of some aspects of Elizabeth Warren that I had not seen surface in the media yet.  It touches a little more on her personality and likability. There are a few personal snippets in the video.

If you are interested in more details about Elizabeth Warren, you can always read her WikiPedia bio.

Why do we believe in electrons, but not in fairies? by Benjamin Kuipers is another great piece that was brought to my attention by Ray Salemi. Just to give you an idea of what is in the piece, I have the following quote:

Science education is about teaching the scientific method, and about teaching some of the knowledge that the human race has acquired by applying the scientific method. It would be a useful part of a science class to teach the distinction between theories that are scientific because they make testable predictions, and other theories that could be true, but are not scientific because they don’t.

I have first extracted the audio from the article, Rick Perry Rewrites His Own History Again, Claims He Never Considered Secession, because I think it is worthwhile to hear what he said before you see him denying that he said it.

Perry is technically correct that he never uttered the word “secession,” but he did say that “when we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation. And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.” Just in case Perry doesn’t remember saying that he is “thinking about” seceding, he can listen to himself saying it here:

For the record, Perry isn’t just wrong about his own previously stated views on secession, he was also wrong the first time when he claimed Texas has the right to secede from the union.

You can click on the link at the start of this post to see the video of his denial. After seeing it, you can judge for yourself if what he said in his denial is an accurate description of what you hear in the audio.

As a fan of Rev. Wright, I know how clips can be manipulated to make it appear you said something you never did say. I will keep an open mind for the time when Rick Perry decides to explain the exact audio clip that I included above. Given that he did say in the clip that he is thinking about the deal to leave the country anytime Texans wanted to, it is still possible that he further went on to describe how that option was no longer available after a Supreme Court decision that was handed down after the Civil War (or War of Northern Aggression as I have heard southerners call it.)

The video below is the second of the edited parts of the interview of Gov. Mitch Daniels on The Daily Show.

If Elizabeth Warren had been conducting the interview, I wonder if she would have said,

For entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, don’t they have to have customers? If you take the money out of the hands of the customers and just give it to the entrepreneurs, they don’t have to grow the economy to get more money, and they can’t grow it because the potential customers have no money.

Given this reality, how can you say your tax policies are pro-growth?

The unedited interview is better than the cut down version that appears at the top of this post. Below are the video clips of the unedited interview.

The video below must be the source of the poster that I showed in the post The Other 98%.

Elizabeth Warren makes the case the way I wish more politicians did. It is one thing to be a supporter of the cause fundamentally. It is a major step up to be able to explain the cause in a way that does it justice.

The headline I used, WATCH: Elizabeth Warren rebuts ‘class warfare’ charges, comes from the post on Raw Story. There it gives a little context to the video.

In case you are interested in participating, I figured I might as well post a link to the source of the demonstrations,  #OCCUPYWALLTREET on Adbusters.org.

The three previous posts are Olbermann calls out media hypocrisy on ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest, “Days of Rage” Occupy Wall St. and Occupy Wall Street organizer: Republicans are the ones waging class warfare.

The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur explains why he supports the Occupy Wall Street protests that are not being covered enough (if at all) by the mainstream media.

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