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Gosh! I didn't see that coming.

Gosh! I didn't see that coming.

Lion, Tiger and Bear Make for Odd, Yet Happy Family at Ga. Sanctuary By Steve OsunsamiABC News Apr 10, 2013 6:50pm See article for video: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/lion-tiger-and-bear-make-for-odd-yet-happy-family-at-ga-sanctuary/ At Noah’s Ark, a wild-animal rescue center in Georgia, the “BLT” are an unlikely trio that even “Oz’s” Dorothy would find hard to fear. “It’s a lion, a tiger and a bear — oh my!” said Allison Hedgecoth of Noah’s Ark. “They live together and they don’t see their differences. They don’t see their color differences.” In a small pen, Baloo (an American black bear), Leo (the lion) and Shere Kahn (a Bengal tiger) cuddle, play ball, chase each other around, eat cookies daily and seem to have forged a friendship for life. Image credit: ABC News “It’s kind of unusual because black bears and tigers would be solitary as adults,” said Rebecca Snyder, a curator of animals at Atlanta’s zoo. The three predators were rescued as cubs 12 years ago from drug dealers who’d abused and neglected them. “All of them had issues,” Hedgecoth said. “Leo, the lion, had a big raw spot on his nose. Baloo, the bear, had an ingrown harness where his owners hadn’t lengthened it as he grew, so it actually grew into the skin and it had to be surgically removed. … They have recovered more than 100 percent.” But when trainers tried to separate the animals, they acted out. For years, trainers said they worried and waited for fights but had witnessed nothing but peace among the three. Hedgecoth said she didn’t know how the trio had managed to get along together so well and for so long. “I think that the ordeal they went through as youngsters really bonded them together,” she told ABC News. “That’s all that they had. They only had each other for comfort.” She said separating them now, after more than a decade together, would be “cruel.” “There definitely is something special going on between the three of them,” she said. “That is definitely a lesson.” http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/lion-tiger-and-bear-make-for-odd-yet-happy-family-at-ga-sanctuary/

I wonder if it is possible to have a relatively inexpensive device installed in theaters that will block all cell phone reception. Unfortunate if we have to resort to that type of thing but maybe it is best to fight technology with technology. The problem is a symptom of the underlying disease....people losing common sense, courtesy and decency with regards to dealing with others.

I know those folks, at least some of them, having delivered a light GA twin to them at Notre Dame ( the US version). Amazing what priests can be up to. Yes, subtlety and equivocation are often the "watch words" in gaydom. Best regards, RA1

Bullshit. There are enough examples of pre-modern societies accepting same-sex-attracted people to refute your economic hypothesis entirely. This prejudice has many origins, but that ain't one of them. Read your history.

How do we know a dog's father is not homophobic? Of course, unless we were there at the time, how do we know who the dog's father actually is? What about the other 1499 species? How we know their actions weren't a decision? Are you saying it is genetic? Personally I prefer 509's. In case someone does not get this, it is all tongue in cheek (but I won't say whose). Of course all prejudices are learned, to include being homophobic. Best regards, RA1

I never had a doubt what you preferred for breakfast. Protein in a more semi-solid form. Best regards, RA1

One more not-a-joke-at-all...

Just call me Captain Obvious. Best regards, RA1

Well Adam you got me there.... I have been known to "suck" on a big hog from time to time.....

WaPo's Ezra Klein thinks it is all fizzling w.r.t. threat to BO. Interesting conclusions and also embedded side references. The scandals are falling apart By Ezra Klein, Published: May 16, 2013 at 11:47 am Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global). But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal. The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time. On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them. 1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency. The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again. If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here. 2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA. As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well: According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators. White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points. But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate. So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be. 3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies. Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post’s Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It’s likely that the measure’s national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can — and probably should — take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it’s likely to be killed by them again. The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was “passive.” He seemed to be a “bystander.” His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself. That perception, too, seems to be changing. Mike Allen’s Playbook, which is ground zero for scandal CW, led Thursday with a squib that says “the West Wing got its mojo back” and is “BACK ON OFFENSE.” Yes, the caps are in the original. The smarter voices on the right are also beginning to counsel caution. ”While there’s still more information to be gathered and more investigations to be done, all indications are that these decisions – on the AP, on the IRS, on Benghazi – don’t proceed from [Obama],” wrote Ben Domenech in The Transom, his influential conservative morning newsletter. “The talk of impeachment is absurd. The queries of ‘what did the president know and when did he know it’ will probably end up finding out “’just about nothing, and right around the time everyone else found out.’” I want to emphasize: It’s always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals. And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501©(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn’t get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/the-scandals-are-falling-apart/?hpid=z1

Well, then there is this view... No, Obama — I Said More Bullsh*t, Not Bulworth By Jonathan Chait New York Magazine Peter Baker reports that President Obama occasionally fantasizes, as many presidents do, of imitating a 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a politician who suddenly started saying exactly what he thought: Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. While Mr. Beatty’s character had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama’s desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him. You can see Obama’s Bulworth fantasies popping out from time to time, especially when reporters ask him why he can’t force Republicans to pass sensible compromises. Here is an excerpt from a recent press conference where Obama went slightly Bulworth: Question: Mr. President, to your question, what could you do - first of all, couldn’t you just have them down here and refuse to let them leave the room until you have a deal? (Laughter.) Obama: I mean, Jessica, I am not a dictator. I’m the President. So, ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say, we need to go to catch a plane, I can't have Secret Service block the doorway, right? So - Question: But isn’t that part of leadership? I’m sorry to interrupt, but isn’t – Obama: I understand. And I know that this has been some of the conventional wisdom that's been floating around Washington that somehow, even though most people agree that I’m being reasonable, that most people agree I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don't take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right. Well, they're elected. We have a constitutional system of government. The Speaker of the House and the leader of the Senate and all those folks have responsibilities. What I can do is I can make the best possible case for why we need to do the right thing. I can speak to the American people about the consequences of the decisions that Congress is making or the lack of decision-making by Congress. But, ultimately, it’s a choice they make. The trouble is that these answers, while true, don’t actually help Obama. Any political scientist will tell you that the scope for possible legislation in this term is very narrow: The median House member is a very conservative Republican who represents a district that voted for Mitt Romney, and whose biggest political risk is losing a primary to an even more conservative Republican. But most political reporters and analysts don’t pay attention to the political science. They like narratives that revolve around the president as a protagonist. When you confront them with structural analysis that confounds their narratives, they just get upset with you. It serves no purpose. That’s why I advised Obama to use “less real talk and more bullshit.” A post-presidency Obama who actually spoke his mind, rather than fashion himself a post-partisan eminence, as post-presidents do — now that would be awesome. But the reason politicians don’t go Bulworth is that it doesn’t work. The truth about legislative dynamics is complicated and depressing. People don’t want to hear it. Last night, for example, Obama said of the IRS scandal, “The good news is it’s fixable, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to work together to fix it.” That is some prime-caliber bullshit. Of course it’s not in the Republicans’ best interest to fix the problems with IRS enforcement. It’s in their interest to prevent any fix and let the problems linger as long as possible. But if he had said that, there would have been a huge outcry, and probably a presidential apology. Nobody objected to Obama’s faux-naïve claim that Republicans will naturally want to solve the problem. Bullshit works. Bulworth doesn’t. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/obama-i-said-more-bullsht-not-bulworth.html

LTC insurance is difficult to obtain IF you have any sort of health issues that contrast with a company's strict underwriting policies. There are three main benefits to LTC insurance. One obviously being the money the insurance provides for one's care. Two being that the total benefit (in dollars) becomes protected from Medicaid. In other words, if you have a two year contract at $300 a day, the $219,000 in total benefits prevents the state from forcing you to spend that amount from your savings or investments. The way that Medicaid works is that you have to spend all of your assets before the state kicks in with the above mentioned exception. Three being many care facilities will not accept anyone who cannot demonstrate the ability to pay for continued care. That can mean big assets or it can mean insurance. In other words you likely can get into a "better" facility than you might otherwise afford IF you have insurance. One kicker is that state law will prevent the facility from putting you out the door, once admitted. This may be the "best" benefit to LTC insurance. Best regards, RA1

As citylaw and others have said, long-term care insurance is a very good idea for anyone still in position to put it in place. My 84yo mother has a policy (not near needing to use it yet, thank the Lord) that provides a 2-year benefit period for premium of $1350/yr.

Long term health care insurance isn't cheap (roughly 4k per year) but it offers private nursing, facilities, etc. without touching your savings. On a side note, I feel for you here. Not easy at all.

Actually my mother moved into a retirement community at age 65 so she would have help with her mother who was living with her. She unfailingly called this facility the old folks home. They promised, for a fee, to take care of her for the rest of her life which they did. But, of course, they were not perfect. Most of the time my mother was happy in the general community, living in her own apartment with two meals furnished and plenty of activities and amenities. There was enough variety and a large community so that I think it was easy enough to deal with minor inconveniences. Of course the maintenance fees went up every year and had more than doubled after the 27 years she lived there. When her health began to decline and she fell a few times, first she went to rehab and then to the long term care which most of us call a nursing home. All co-located. Here one finds the meat and potatoes of such a facility. In my case, I have few complaints about the care and caring of the staff. Basically they gave good care and were caring. I even have good things to say about the "middle" supervisors but not so much good to say about the upper management. As I and others have observed in the past, no one likes their landlord. They did deliver what they promised but it could have been done with less acrimony and, where have you heard this before, more transparency. As it turned out, I did not know all the rules and ramifications thereof until too late to make them work better for me and us. Before signing any agreement or contract with any facility I highly recommend reading through the literature and contract. Any questions you can ask to improve your understanding thereof will pay benefits in the long run. Peace of mind is imperative and sometimes the least found commodity. Best regards, RA1

It would definitely involve a time machine