This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

August 31 is the 243rd day of the year (244th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 122 days remaining until the end of the year.

I am very hesitant to make the death of Princess Diana the prominent story of the day but her death was a tragedy on so many levels that it is not surprising that the world nearly stood still for 6 days until her funeral. There are many things that we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when they happened, like 9/11 and, for those of us old enough, JFK’s assassination.

I was living in Paris then not far from the site of the accident. I had been out to dinner that evening with my then ex-husband, Dr. TMC, when we heard the crash, it was that loud, and shortly after the sirens of emergency vehicles. Not unusual in Paris, so, we continued on to our destinations. It wasn’t until very early that I heard that the Princess had died and where. Paris was stunned. The site became a instant memorial.

We all sat glued to the TV for days waiting for the Queen to say something. The Queen badly underestimated the admiration that was held her former daughter-in-law.  The day of her funeral Paris froze, the only time I have ever seen the city this quiet was on 9/11.

After being criticized for failing to satisfactorily match the grief of the British people, the royal family arranged for a state funeral to be held for Diana at Westminster Abbey on September 6. Diana’s coffin was taken from Kensington Palace to the Abbey on a horse-drawn gun carriage, and an estimated one million mourners lined the route. Diana’s sons, William, 15, and Harry, 12, joined their father, Prince Charles; grandfather Prince Philip; and uncle Charles, the Earl of Spencer, to walk the final stretch of the procession with the casket. The only sound was the clatter of the horses’ hooves and the peal of a church bell.

The service, watched by an estimated two billion people worldwide, sacrificed royal pomp for a more human touch. Workers associated with Diana’s various charities represented 500 of the 2,000 people invited to attend the funeral. Elton John, a friend of Diana, lent a popular touch to the ceremony when he sang “Candle in the Wind,” accompanying himself on piano. After the service, Diana’s body was taken by hearse to her family’s ancestral estate near Althorp, north of London. In a private ceremony, she was laid to rest on a tree-shaded island in a small lake, securely beyond the reach of the camera lens.

Since the death of Princess Diana, Althorp, which has been in the Spencer family for over 500 years, is now a popular tourist attraction that offers tours to the general public.

I still light a candle in her memory on this day.

Blessed Be.

Now I talk to the chairs. In a bizarre, unscripted rambling monolog Clint Eastwood spoke to an empty chair representing President Barack Obama.  That was not his best performance.

Mitt Romney probably hoped that surprise guest Clint Eastwood would make his day at the convention — instead, the 82-year-old gave a rambling speech that was as disastrous as the botched bank robbery that he stopped in “Dirty Harry” while playing a jaded San Francisco cop. [..]

Eastwood, who praised Romney as a “stellar businessman,” later said that he thought it was never a good idea for attorneys to be president, despite the fact that Romney has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. [..]

The otherwise prolific actor and director clearly appeared to be showing his age in what was meant to be a big coup for Republicans as their “mystery speaker.” [..]

The Romney campaign seemed to grasp how Eastwood’s bizarre, rambling, unscripted speech fell flat. “Judging an American icon like Clint Eastwood through a typical political lens doesn’t work,” was the campaign’s response. Aides winced backstage, according to the Associated Press.

Eastwood’s attacks on Obama didn’t faze the campaign. “Referring all questions on this to Salvador Dali,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an email to The Huffington Post.

It’s a bit hard to figure what the RNC organizers were thinking when they invited Clint to play such a prominent roll. After all he isn’t exactly a family values kind of guy or, for that matter, much of a 2012 Republican. This is what he said during an interview with GQ about his film J. Edgar that starred Leonardo DiCaprio:

GQ: Yeah, but maybe between the movies you have some political feelings. [to Eastwood] You’ve described yourself as a social libertarian. What does that mean to you?

Clint Eastwood: I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War. And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, Let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone. These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage? I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.

Leonardo Dicaprio: That’s the most infuriating thing-watching people focus on these things. Meanwhile, there’s the onset of global warming and-

Clint Eastwood: Exactly!

Leonardo Dicaprio: -and these incredibly scary and menacing things with the future of our economy. Our relationship to the rest of the world. And here we are focusing on this?

Clint Eastwood: They go on and on with all this bullshit about “sanctity”-don’t give me that sanctity crap! Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.

Stick to singing, Clint

The economist has been a vocal critic of Ryan’s budget. On Wednesday, he appeared on Current TV to analyze the plan with Al Gore – who is hosting the network’s coverage of the conventions – and hosts Eliot Spitzer and Jennifer Granholm.

Krugman said that Ryan’s plan would leave “tens of millions” of people without health insurance. Gore said that his understanding is that it would take money from the poor and give it to the rich while increasing the budget deficit.

Krugman said that was indeed the case. “How can [Ryan] get away with this?” he asked incredulously. “World’s greatest nation falls for this flimflam?”

Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless. [..]

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie – and, yes, it deserves that designation – was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program. [..]

The Republican Party is now firmly committed to replacing Medicare with what we might call Vouchercare. The government would no longer pay your major medical bills; instead, it would give you a voucher that could be applied to the purchase of private insurance. And, if the voucher proved insufficient to buy decent coverage, hey, that would be your problem.

Moreover, the vouchers almost certainly would be inadequate; their value would be set by a formula taking no account of likely increases in health care costs. [..]

The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?

You should realize you’ve screwed up when your own paid shills call out your lies:

According to Fox News columnist Sally Kohn, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday “was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”

“On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold,” Kohn wrote. [..]

In her column, Kohn called out four lies in Ryan’s speech. She critcized Ryan for blaming President Obama for the shutdown of a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., that actually was closed during the Bush administration. She also knocked Ryan for pinning the blame for S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt on Obama, when Republicans in Congress helped precipitate the downgrade by threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

“The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth,” Kohn wrote.

But they will continue to repeat this litany of lies and the people will believe. Hallelujah! Amen!

Message to Romney and Obama: Keep Your Hands Off Medicare

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial: The Vacuum Behind the Slogans

The party that claims to have all the answers on Medicare seemed to have no interest in sharing them with the American people at its convention on Wednesday. The session, devoted to the theme of “We Can Change It,” never went any deeper than that slogan or a few others: Reform Medicare. Strengthen Medicare. Protect Medicare.

All without the slightest hint of how that supposed reform or strengthening would take place, regarding that program and many others. “We will not duck the tough issues; we will lead,” said Representative Paul Ryan, in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination. “We will not spend four years blaming others; we will take responsibility.”

Sounds great, except that the speech ducked the tough issues and blamed others for the problems.

Mo Rocca: ‘The Right to Vote’

Pop quiz. Which of the following countries does not guarantee its citizens the right to vote? Is it:

(A) Iran

(B) Libya

(C) The United States

(D) All of the above.

If you guessed “all of the above,” you’re right. Yes, the United States is one of only a handful of nations whose constitution does not explicitly provide the right to vote. (Singapore is another, but it doesn’t even allow you to chew gum on the street.)

I imagine you’re surprised. I know I was. Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in – the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill – and yet they neglected to include the right to vote. (I know, it was a long, hot summer. Hard to stay focused.) It got me thinking: What else don’t I know about voting in our country? How does voting really work – or sometimes not work – in America?

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

August 30 is the 242nd day of the year (243rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 123 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1967, Thurgood Marshall becomes the first African American to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. He would remain on the Supreme Court for 24 years before retiring for health reasons, leaving a legacy of upholding the rights of the individual as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, the great-grandson of a slave who was born in modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo.His original name was Thoroughgood, but he shortened it to Thurgood  in second grade because he disliked spelling it. His father, William Marshall, who was a railroad porter, instilled in him an appreciation for the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law.

Marshall graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore in 1925 and from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930. Afterward, Marshall wanted to apply to his hometown law school, the University of Maryland School of Law, but the dean told him that he would not be accepted because of the school’s segregation policy. Later, as a civil rights litigator, he successfully sued the school for this policy in the case of Murray v. Pearson. As he could not attend the University of Maryland, Marshall sought admission and was accepted at Howard University School of Law.

Marshall received his law degree from the Howard University School of Law in 1933 where he graduated first in his class.

Marshall won his very first U.S. Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940), at the age of 32. That same year, he was appointed Chief Counsel for the NAACP. He argued many other cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully, including Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950). His most famous case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” public education, as established by Plessy v. Ferguson, was not applicable to public education because it could never be truly equal. In total, Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

Marshall served on the Court for the next twenty-four years, compiling a liberal record that included strong support for Constitutional protection of individual rights, especially the rights of criminal suspects against the government. His most frequent ally on the Court (indeed, the pair rarely voted at odds) was Justice William Brennan, who consistently joined him in supporting abortion rights and opposing the death penalty. Brennan and Marshall concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled four years later that the death penalty was constitutional in some circumstances. Thereafter, Brennan or Marshall dissented from every denial of certiorari in a capital case and from every decision upholding a sentence of death.[citation needed] In 1987, Marshall gave a controversial speech on the occasion of the bicentennial celebrations of the Constitution of the United States. Marshall stated,

   

“the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.”

In conclusion Marshall stated

   

“Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.”

He retired from the Supreme Court in 1991, and was reportedly unhappy that it would fall to President George H. W. Bush to name his replacement. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace Marshall.

Marshall died of heart failure at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, at 2:58 p.m. on January 24, 1993 at the age of 84. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His second wife and their two sons survived him

On November 30, 1993, Justice Marshall was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

Over the last two days slow moving Hurricane Isaac has pounded the Gulf Coast states with high winds, torrential rain and coastal storm surge at high tides. Seven years after the disaster of Katrina Gulf Coast residents were more wary and many headed away from the coast to higher ground and shelters. Now downgraded to a tropical storm, New Orleans’ new levees, built with federal funding, have held, but to the west of the city, in Plaquemines Parish, there has been serious flooding and emergency evacuation and rescues are underway. There are plans to open a hole in the levee there to relieve the pressure behind the wall that if breached would cause even more damage.

On Wednesday, President Obama declared major disaster areas in Mississippi and Louisiana and has ordered the release of federal aid to supplement state and local recovery.

One friend of Stars Hollow who lives in the direct line of the storm managed to send a message before they lost power, that this was the slowest storm that she had ever experienced. It’s just not moving:

The worst-hit part of the coast was Plaquemines Parish, La., the finger of land that follows the Mississippi River from Orleans Parish out into the Gulf of Mexico, and the place where both Isaac and Katrina first made landfall.

Fears that a locally built gulf-side levee would be overtopped by Isaac’s massive surge were well founded. Many of those on Plaquemines Parish’s east bank who ignored Monday’s order to leave were forced into their attics when the gulf poured in, filling up the bowl between the levees with up to 14 feet of water.

Dozens of people had to be pulled to safety by rescue workers and neighbors. As of Wednesday evening, water was beginning to creep up the west bank of the parish as well, prompting officials to go door to door to evacuate what is effectively the bottom two-thirds of the parish.

“We’ve never seen anything like this, not even Katrina,” said a visibly rattled Billy Nungesser, the parish president, in a briefing to reporters. [..]

And still Isaac trudged on, drenching the towns of the north bank of Lake Pontchartrain on Wednesday night and heading at an agonizing 6 miles per hour in the direction of Baton Rouge. Officials warned that the risks were far from over, as flooding was a threat not only along the coast but in mid-Louisiana, upstate Mississippi and the drought-starved regions north. On Wednesday afternoon, Isaac was flooding towns farther inland with its unceasing rain, and was far from finished with southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.

“There is another half of the storm to go for most people who have already begun to experience it,” W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said on a conference call with reporters. “For some folks in the path, the event and the weather haven’t even begun. We are still way early before this is all over.”

While nowhere near the intensity and strength of Katrina, because Isaac is only moving at 10 miles an hour, the damages could match those of 2008’s Gustav, a Cat 2 storm, that topped $2 billion in insurance claims:

While comparatively modest as hurricanes go, Hurricane Isaac is already wreaking havoc. More than 644,000 were without power in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, power companies told CNN. And some 100 residents had been or were in the process of being rescued from flooded homes and rooftops in coastal Plaquemines Parish, according to CNN affiliate WWL.

Eqecat, a catastrophe modeling firm, suggested onshore insured damage — which includes residential property, commercial property, energy production and the interruption of business but excludes most flooding damage — would run between $500 million and $1.5 billion. The firm excludes flooding because the federal government insures against flood damage for most properties.

The storm could also cause more than $500 million in damages to off-shore energy production.

The up side is that so far there has been only one death related to the storm, a young man fell 18 feet from a tree attempting to help his friends move a car. Another person has been reported missing after going jet skiing. A curfew has been declared in New Orleans and surrounding parishes to prevent looting areas without power and make it easier for utility crews to restore electricity.

Donations for victims of Isaac can be made to:

Salvation Army

Call 800-725-2769 (Sal-Army), text RED CROSS to 80888 for a $10 donation or visit www.salvationarmyusa.org.

Red Cross

Call 800-733-2767 (Red-Cross), text REDCROSS to 90999 for a $10 donation or visit www.redcross.org.

Stay safe, poligirl and LaEscapee

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The GOP’s Split-Screen Convention

This week, the anti-disaster assistance party scrambled to shuffle its anti-government convention speakers in the face of Hurricane Isaac. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported, “As the American Petroleum Institute planned a concert and a party here to push its agenda, which includes expansion of oil exploration on federal lands, some of its members were ramping down production in the gulf and removing workers from platforms.”

Welcome to Republicans’ “split screen” convention week. On one side of your TV screen, competitive condemnations of the government boot on the American economy’s neck. On the other: a dangerous storm that dramatically symbolizes the need for strong infrastructure, sane environmental policy and solid emergency response. Unlike the Republicans, the storm won’t talk. But the contrast speaks volumes.

Amanda Marcotte: She’s Just an Easy-Bake Oven: How the GOP and the Anti-Choice Movement See Women

The good news about the Rep. Todd Akin situation is that it genuinely seems to have raised the public’s awareness of how much the anti-choice movement is rooted not in some love of fetal life, but in a profound misogyny that focuses heavily on fear of female sexuality. Akin’s ready assumption that women frequently lie about rape to cover up their sexual adventures was a perfect example of the demonized view of female sexual liberty driving the anti-choice movement, one that has very little relation to how women actually act in the world. But the exposure of the ugly, misogynist heart of the anti-choice movement might come at a price: Other dehumanizing, ugly attitudes towards women expressed by anti-choicers might seem more moderate by comparison.

For instance, Rep. Paul Ryan, now a nominee for Vice President, has a long history of using incredibly dehumanizing language towards women and speaking of women as if they non-sentient beings, while seemingly imbuing even fertilized eggs with the sentience he won’t grant women. Even though he’s no doubt been strongly coached to try to at least mimic compassion for women, the notion that women have internal lives and experiences that matter just doesn’t seem to factor into his discussion of reproductive rights. Instead, he just falls back on talking about women as if they’re nothing but flesh-bound ovens to cook male heirs. Which, naturally, led to the same kind of minimization of rape that Akin is accused of engaging in.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

August 29 is the 241st day of the year (242nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 124 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1533, the 300 year old Inca civilization ended when Francisco Pizarro’s conquistadors strangled the last Inca Emperor, Atahuallpa.

High in the Andes Mountains of Peru, the Inca built a dazzling empire that governed a population of 12 million people. Although they had no writing system, they had an elaborate government, great public works, and a brilliant agricultural system. In the five years before the Spanish arrival, a devastating war of succession gripped the empire. In 1532, Atahuallpa’s army defeated the forces of his half-brother HuÁscar in a battle near Cuzco. Atahuallpa was consolidating his rule when Pizarro and his 180 soldiers appeared.

In 1531, Pizarro sailed down to Peru, landing at Tumbes. He led his army up the Andes Mountains and on November 15, 1532, reached the Inca town of Cajamarca, where Atahuallpa was enjoying the hot springs in preparation for his march on Cuzco, the capital of his brother’s kingdom. Pizarro invited Atahuallpa to attend a feast in his honor, and the emperor accepted. Having just won one of the largest battles in Inca history, and with an army of 30,000 men at his disposal, Atahuallpa thought he had nothing to fear from the bearded white stranger and his 180 men. Pizarro, however, planned an ambush, setting up his artillery at the square of Cajamarca.

On November 16, Atahuallpa arrived at the meeting place with an escort of several thousand men, all apparently unarmed. Pizarro sent out a priest to exhort the emperor to accept the sovereignty of Christianity and Emperor Charles V., and Atahuallpa refused, flinging a Bible handed to him to the ground in disgust. Pizarro immediately ordered an attack. Buckling under an assault by the terrifying Spanish artillery, guns, and cavalry (all of which were alien to the Incas), thousands of Incas were slaughtered, and the emperor was captured.

Atahuallpa offered to fill a room with treasure as ransom for his release, and Pizarro accepted. Eventually, some 24 tons of gold and silver were brought to the Spanish from throughout the Inca empire. Although Atahuallpa had provided the richest ransom in the history of the world, Pizarro treacherously put him on trial for plotting to overthrow the Spanish, for having his half-brother HuÁscar murdered, and for several other lesser charges. A Spanish tribunal convicted Atahuallpa and sentenced him to die. On August 29, 1533, the emperor was tied to a stake and offered the choice of being burned alive or strangled by garrote if he converted to Christianity. In the hope of preserving his body for mummification, Atahuallpa chose the latter, and an iron collar was tightened around his neck until he died.

The first day of the Republican Party Convention in Tampa, Florida was mercifully brief due to tropical storm Isaac. Isaac is now a hurricane and bearing down on the Gulf Coast as a eerie reminder of hurricane Katrina seven years ago and the disastrous Bush regime handling of the disaster. Today the convention hits its stride and was called to order by RNC Chair Reince Priebus at 2 PM. The afternoon covered adoption of the rules and platform. The rules have been changed to stifle other candidates like Ron Paul, who has been denied a speaker’s spot, and former vice presidential nominee, Sara Palan who was not invited.

Tonight’s highlight will be the keynote speech delivered by New Jersey’s own bully-boy governor Chris Christie and the speech delayed from possible future First Lady, Ann Romney with Mitt close by to cheer her.

To fit all of these folks into the 4 hours, all the speakers were told to edit their addresses to fit the time they were allotted, in the case of the first hour that’s less than 10 minutes. That will be quite a feat.  

Here is a list of speakers and the times they are supposed to appear with my take on what they’ll say:

7 p.m.

• House Speaker John Boehner: The Orange Smoking Man wants to throw Obama out of the bar. Then he’ll cry
• RNC Chairman Reince Priebus He’ll reenforce the litany of lies
• Video and Mayor Mia Love (Saratoga Springs, Utah), U.S. congressional candidate: She is the first black woman to run on the Republican ticket. Her roll will be to appeal to black women. Good luck with that one, honey.
• Janine Turner: Actress turned tearless activist who will no doubt insist that Obama was born on Mars in Kenya or someother milder form of birther bs.
• Former Sen. Rick Santorum: Rick will focus on attacking welfare. He still Googles well.
• Host, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers: House rep from Washington with a Down Syndrome child will end the  firsthour with coffee and donuts.

8 p.m.

• Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), accompanied by Jack Gilchrist: She need a “crutch”?  Gilchrist is the businessman who insists he did it all by himself despite the millions federal assistance and contracts he received.
• Gov. John Kasich (Ohio): Will talk about the great job he’s done trying to suppress workers’ rights.
• Gov. Mary Fallin (Okla.): Looks like she’ll be touting “Drill, baby, drill” theme.
• Gov. Bob McDonnell (Va.), accompanied by Bev Gray: Gray is an architect. I doubt they’ll be talking about transvaginal probe design but that would be a more interesting speech.
• Gov. Scott Walker (Wis.): [Another anti-union speech about how collective bargaining rights destroyed the economy]

9 p.m.

• Gov. Brian Sandoval (Nev.): He’ll attack Obama’s Welfare Waivers after requesting flexibility.
• Sher Valenzuela (small-business owner, candidate for Delaware lt. governor): Another GOP candidate that built her business with 17 million in federal loans & contracts.
• Senate Republican candidate Ted Cruz (Texas): He has the delusional notion that the Hispanic community is conservative & opposed to amnesty.
• Former Rep. Artur Davis: Former Democrat now Republican who claims voter ID laws do not violate civil rights or suppress voter turn out.
• Gov. Nikki Haley (S.C.)

10 p.m.

• Mrs. Lucé Vela Fortuño: Puerto Rico’s First Lady who will introduce Ann Romney
• Mrs. Ann Romney: The “Queen of Equestrian Mean” will deign to address “you people” with hubby Mitt leading the ovation
• Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.): Certainly the highlight of the night will be this blustering buffoon who would love to have you believe he saved New Jersey.
• Benediction by Sammy Rodriguez: Finally, a rousing “amen” from a Hispanic Evangelical. So far no Mormon Tabernacle Choir

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Lydia Netzer: The Man in the Moon

MOST technological advances are actually just improvements. One thing builds on the next: from shoddy to serviceable, from helpful to amazing. First you had a carriage, then a car, and then an airplane; now you have a jet. You improve on what is there. Technological advances are like that.

Except for the one that involved landing on the Moon. When a human went and stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, that was a different kind of breakthrough. Nothing tangible changed when Neil Armstrong’s foot dug into the lunar dust and his eyes turned back at us. We didn’t get faster wheels or smaller machines or more effective medicine. But we changed, fundamentally. What had been unknown, was known. What had been unseen was seen. And our human horizon popped out 200,000 miles. Forever, we would see the Earth differently, because we had seen it from someplace truly foreign.

This is why Mars is important. When we get a human to Mars – in the next few decades, NASA has predicted – our horizon will expand 1,000 times farther, and it will never go back.

New York Times Editorial: The Storm, Again

Tropical Storm Isaac is more than just a logistical inconvenience for Republicans gathered in Tampa: it is a powerful reminder both of Republican incompetence in handling Hurricane Katrina seven years ago, and the party’s no-less-disastrous plans to further cut emergency-related spending.

That is not something you will hear Paul Ryan talk about this week at the convention, nor any of the other lawmakers who make simplistic promises about the power of slashing government spending. But the budgets assembled by Mr. Ryan and warmly embraced by Mitt Romney severely cut spending for emergency preparedness, exactly the kind of money needed in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and scores of other states for this and future storms. [..]

One of the themes of the Tampa convention will be the failure of government, and the prosperity that will result if it is cut to ribbons. But in a different corner of the television screen, the winds of Isaac are a reminder of the necessity of government – its labor, its expertise, its money – in the nation’s most dire moments. It is hard to forget what happened to New Orleans when that Republican philosophy was followed in 2005, and it will be harder still to explain how it might be allowed to happen again.