McClatchy has the article Mitt Romney sets off culture skirmish over Israel economy.

Mitt Romney suggested Monday that Israelis enjoy a better standard of living than neighboring Palestinians do because they have a superior culture and enjoy the “hand of providence.”

One thing I do know, is that I do not want Mitt Romney’s bigotry to represent me and my country to the rest of the world.

I find that if you cannot detect stereotypical, bigoted, racist thinking in your own ideas, then one of the best ways to get woken up is to meet some people who violate your stereotypes very radically.  In my life I have had the pleasure of working with and becoming friends with some Palestinians who are the antithesis of Mitt Romney’s pronouncement in every respect.

One friend in particular, that I can think of was raised and educated through undergraduate college in the middle-east.  He came to the United States to get a technical PhD from one of the top technical universities in this country.

When he came for a job interview at our company, I was very much in favor of hiring him on my firmly held belief that I liked to hire people smarter than myself.  He certainly did not disappoint through his tenure at the company.

He eventually went on to become a professor at a mid-western university.  I have a sense of how hard he worked to gain tenure.   He guided student’s work in leading edge research so that they could  earn their PhD’s.  He wrote, co-wrote articles, and presented his and his student’s research at many technical conferences.  He had leadership roles in technical organizations, and was a sought after consultant to many of the most prominent technical companies.

What also struck me was his command of the English language.  I was struck when he demonstrated better knowledge of both the formal aspects of the language and better knowledge of some of the idioms than I, as a native speaker of English, had.

His compassion for his family and his friends was also remarkable.

When it came time for me to leave the company where we had worked together, he pointed me to contacts at one of the companies where he had consulted.  That lead to work that I did as a major part of the rest of my career.  That work was related to what I learned from working with him at the previous company.

Talking Points Memo has the article Romney: Socialized Health Care Good For Israel, Not For U.S..

During a trip to Israel, Mitt Romney hailed the nation’s health care system for holding down costs and broadening coverage more effectively than the U.S.

The irony: Israel contains costs by adopting a very centralized, government-run health care system — anathema to Romney’s Republican Party.

“Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? Eight percent. You spend eight percent of GDP on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation,” he said Monday at a breakfast fundraiser, according to the New York Times. “We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military — our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.”

Israel’s health care system is an instructive exercise in all that rankles American conservatives — replete with government mandates, price controls and centralized payments funded mostly by high taxes.

Why does Romney hate America so much?  Or is it just Americans that he doesn’t like?

The BBC has the story Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans. The following quote has a certain ironic synchronicity with a conversation that a friend and I have been having.

The team argues that the good correspondence between the new temperature record and historical data on CO2 emissions suggests human activity is “the most straightforward explanation” for the warming.

I am not a climate change denier, and I am not disagreeing with the finding of these scientists, however I must point out that though ‘human activity is “the most straightforward explanation” for the warming’, being the most straightforward does not prove it is the correct explanation.

The strength of their conclusion depends on how rigorous and thorough the scientists were in testing a large universe of other possible explanations.   From this article, we have no idea how this study stacks up under that criterion.

As an engineer, the way that I think it would be proper to proceed on trying to ameliorate the effects of global climate change would be to always ask “If we are wrong about climate change, what would be the effect of the proposed policy change?”  If you can honestly say that the new policy were a good one and a cost effective one even if we are wrong about global climate change, then you have a policy change that you can feel very comfortable about proposing.

Even if humans are not the major cause of climate change, it would still make sense to lessen our impact on the problem so as not to make a natural phenomenon even worse.  In times of drought, we try to conserve water even though humans are not the cause of the drought.

I cannot attest to the correctness of this reporter’s suppositions, but I had already thought of the possibility of what he is saying before I heard him say it.

To think that Mitt Romney is so naive that he would travel to Israel and espouse a position that accepts the Israeli version of the events hook, line, and sinker. Note that the official position of the U.S. government is that they do not have sufficient evidence to make any of the claims that Israel is making.

If our current bellicose stance toward Iran has little chance of success, imagine what an even worse effort from Mitt Romney would bring. I wouldn’t be surprised if your imaginings brought you to a third (or is it fifth) war in the middle-east that would cost our country dearly. I can think of a number of companies whose interests would be greatly enhance by such a war, and I am not surprised that these companies support Mitt Romney.

I first got wind of this story from an email subscription to the CPA Letter Daily.  They titled it, Former Citigroup CEO calls for return of Glass-Steagall Act.

Sandy Weill, who practically invented the mega-bank when he ran Citigroup in the 1990s, said such banks should be broken up. Weill pushed for a return of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banks’ deposit-taking operations from trading businesses. “Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big too fail,”

The email had several links, Sandy Weill: the architect of megabanks says America should break them up in the UK Telegraph.  This has more than was written in the CPA Letter Daily.

Most of the video of the interview can be seen on the CNBC web site, Weill: Why Big Banks Should Be Broken Up.  I had a hard time getting the video to play, but eventually it did play.  Despite this difficulty, it is worth trying to view the video because you get a better feel for what he really did say than you get from the brief printed quotes in the other  two sources mentioned above.

Even Jon Stewart on The Daily Show remarked (humorously) about Sandy Weill’s interview.

I found it ironic when Weill compared the need of the banks to attract the best and the brightest in order to be competitive to the need for Silicon Valley companies to attract the best and the brightest engineers for them to succeed.  Having spent 40 years in the industry whose United States segment  is now concentrated in Silicon Valley, I observed that the best and the brightest were lured away from Silicon Valley to better paying jobs applying their computer skills on Wall Street.  The ability of Wall Street’s shenanigans to pay engineers better than engineering is part of what is wrong with this country.

Here are President Obama’s words without editorial comment.

I just received an email from Elizabeth Warren explaining that she meant what she said last August.  See the email included below.

This exemplifies what I like about Elizabeth Warren as a politician more than I do some others who are also on my wavelength politically.  She seems to have well thought out reasons for the basic stances that she takes.  Because of this, when she receives some flack about what she says, she can defend what she said and does not feel the need to back away from her principles. (That does not mean I think that she is rigid, nor would I admire her if I thought she were,)

In this ad, Elizabeth Warren asks some very good questions.

We’ve got bridges and roads in need of repair and thousands of people in need of work. Why aren’t we rebuilding America? Our competitors are putting people to work, building a future. China invests 9% of its GDP in infrastructure. America? We’re at just 2.4%. We can do better. We can build a foundation for a strong new economy and get people in MA to work right now. I’m Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message. Let’s go to work.

Why do we have to go to the Wonkette web site to learn about this story, Why Won’t Mitt Romney Root For His Wife’s Dumb Horse?

But you’d think that he’d at least take some time out of hating the 2012 Olympics in general to show a little love for America’s greatest Olympian! We’re of course talking about Rafalca, the dressage horse partly owned by Mitt’s wife Ann. Why is he pretending that he hasn’t spent long evenings out in the stables, feeding Rafalca carrots and pouring out his soul?

You’d think that a reputable newspaper such as The Boston Globe would be all over this story considering some of the other stories that they think are important.

Brian Beutler on Talking Points Memo has a nice analysis, Why The Bush Tax Cut Vote Was So Important.

He concludes with the following paragraph:

Now I don’t think the public hew and cry will be loud enough to force Republicans to move off their position before the election. Maybe if this were another issue — but not taxes. And if Mitt Romney wins in November, then they’ll just extend all the Bush tax cuts anyhow. But if Obama wins, this bill will still be live. And the pressure on the House GOP to relent and pass it during the lame duck will be overwhelming.

He might add that the likelihood of Obama’s reelection may have increased because of this vote and what the campaign will make of it.  The sudden display of a spine might also enliven the President’s supporters.  It certainly looks encouraging to me.

I was once under the impression that if the Republicans ran a reasonable candidate against Obama, that Obama had a chance of losing.   Now that we know that Romney can’t (and sometimes doesn’t even try) to hide who he really is and what he really stands for, I think Obama’s chances are improving.