Nearly an hour after his “Every Town Counts” bus tour was scheduled to make a pit stop Saturday at a Quakertown-area Wawa — where dozens of protesters and prominent Democrats had set up camp — Mitt Romney finally pulled up and bought a sandwich.
At a different Wawa.
That left hundreds of people and dozens of protesters — including former Gov. Ed Rendell and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy — standing in vain at a Wawa off the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Quakertown exit, waiting for a bus that was actually four miles away …
After ordering a meatball “sub” — whoops, make that a meatball “hoagie,” he corrected himself — Romney shook hands with the dozen or so customers who happened to be inside the store and had his picture taken with a group of boys from a local baseball team …
The crowd in the coal town was largely older, polite and sparing in ovations. Phil Jeffries, a funeral director from Weatherly, brought a camera and a concern for small businesses to the rally. A Republican who has voted Democratic before, he thinks Romney could clear the red tape that trips up entrepreneurs.
[It’s worth interjecting that funeral directors are not entrepreneurs in the sense of the discussion. They run depression and recession-proof “businesses.”]
Still two hours before Mitt Romney stood in front of a lone microphone atop a grassy mound just outside the entrance to historic Cornwall Iron Furnace on Saturday, the Burtko family of North Cornwall Township was bubbling over with excitement to see the Republican likely to face Barack Obama for the presidency in the fall.
“It’s not every day something like this happens,” Kelly Burtko said as her children, Emily, 9, and Zachary, 7, watched her mother answer questions.
Kelly’s husband, Barry, said he had heard George W. Bush speak near Wilkes-Barre in front of 20,000 people as he campaigned for a second term in 2004 …
Lebanon businessman Ed Kercher said he was “very impressed.” Romney was a more impressive speaker in person than the candidate he had watched on TV, he said.
“This is the most important election we’ve ever had coming up,” Kercher said.
The stories show what the expected — supporters, older, white and non-college educated Republicans who say they have voted Democratic, in the past. Such assertions are “likely stories,” not at all uncommon for interviews of this nature. It’s only human.
However, the next video — tipped to me at Pine View Farm — illustrates a Dem problem. Pale old white loser hacks, in this case ex-Ohio governor Ted Strickland, are the best to be found?
Young people wouldn’t listen to this guy. Older white people certainly didn’t. Strickland lost to Fox News celebrity and Bill O’Reilly stand-in John Kasich. And there’s no reason anyone else would, either.
The video is a grenade and the DNC never gets these slowly desiccating dog turds off the stage.
It’s painful to watch Strickland, who nobody knows — anyway, stutter his way through a poorly framed message, talking about saving the “auto industry in Ohio,” when everyone naturally thinks, “Detroit, Michigan.” You just have to ask yourself, “What’s wrong with the guy? Can he not even write and deliver one vigorous 90-second rebuttal?”
The answer is no, he can’t.
The party won’t field good people. The only inspirational man is the President and after that the talent goes shallow fast.
It’s one of the reasons, along with the reactionary vote that will hit him due to the disastrous economy in the last four years, I believe the president can easily lose to the unprincipled liar, the astonishingly unlikeable and impossible to admire (unless you’re just like him) person that is Mitt Romney.
Stimulus works. It creates jobs. One of the best examples is the explosion in hiring for homeland security, at the local level, for the last twelve years.
Coincidentally, following upon the weekend post which discussed parts of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, this new hire in Odessa, TX:
Ector County Commissioners approved the hiring of a bioterrorism technician at their meeting Monday, but the position covers more than just the threat of terrorist attacks.
Ector County Health Department Director Gino Solla said the position, part of the public health preparedness system, is part-time and assist with duties that involve dealing with disasters that range from manmade attacks to natural incidents.
“It could be radiological or even … a tornado,??? Solla said. “Any time people are hurt or killed, public health gets involved.???
Hired at a step five, or $13.36 an hour, Dillon Harris will be coming from Dwight, Ill., and is a student at Monmouth College. Studying to get into medical school while in college, Harris said he will be taking time off from his studies to get hands-on training before entering his field …
Bioterrorism technician. For this part of Texas. It’s an eye-rolling proposition.
There will never be a bioterror or any other kind of terror incident in this place. Still it is a job for someone who does not have one, which means money spent on the local economy. And — ultimately — all these jobs come from the federal government and grants from agencies like the Dept. of Homeland Security.
They are the equivalent of stimulus. Or, if you prefer, Keynsian jobs programs.
The funding, reads the newspaper, came from “the Bioterrorism Response Program after it was formed in 2003 in response to the Anthrax scares … a large part of the Public Health Emergency Preparedness budget has been issued through grants.”
The grants for the hire are scheduled through 2012 and 2013, it adds.
Readers know I’m a bioterrorism expert. They can easily understand the outrage that results when all domestic jobs which could theoretically be sustained or created by stimulus or thought of as bad.
Except in the cases of creating homeland security positions where there will never even be a theoretical need.
Having said that, creation of a new job in the Odessa area, whatever it may be, is a good thing.
“Rock Of Ages” and Cruise failed to hit the high box office notes, taking in an estimated $15 million from 3,470 locations for the No. 3 spot.
The young males that were seen as the key to broader success for the film didn’t turn out. The audience, which gave the film a B CinemaScore, was 62 percent female, and 74 percent over 25 years of age.
Adam Shankman directed the film based on the Broadway musical, but it couldn’t match his earlier success with another film musical, 2007’s “Hairspray” … The film’s production budget was around $70 million.
“We’re not gonna take it/No we ain’t gonna take it!” — the kids vote with their feet.
Wait for the appropriate scene at 4:22. Or just skip to it. Big Balls & the Great White Idiot, one of the greatest band names of all time.
Takes his campaign tour to where everyone was fired, my old homeland, southeastern rural Pennsy:
WEST HAZELTON, Penn.—Mitt Romney takes his bus tour to Pennsylvania Saturday, hoping to turn the focus back to the economy after a day in which his message was largely overshadowed by President Obama’s immigration decision.
The Republican nominee will begin his day by touring a casting and machine company in Weatherly, located in a rural eastern part of the state. He’ll then make his way west, stopping at a WaWa convenience store in Quakertown and an old iron furnace in Cornwall that is a national historic landmark.
Mitt Romney has nothing in common with the people of the area. The idea of this man at a WaWa in Quakertown, also home of the Q-Mart bazaar, is almost enough to induce tetany. (Follow the link)
Do you think candidate Romney would look good in this? You used to be able to buy them where he’s campaigning.
Romney’s campaign stop is slightly reminiscent of part of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, about football-obsessed Odessa, TX and the Permian High football team. Staunchly conservative in values, the area was destroyed economically by the mid-Eighties and Bissinger tells the story, since watered down and over-simplified in a movie and television series, of how elevation of high school football to a level dwarfing many collegiate programs held the place and people together.
Through Friday Night Lights Bissinger infrequently cites Pennsylvania, Ohio and a couple other states where high school football holds places together, too, just as in Texas.
The American Dream, Bissinger writes, is destroyed but in these places there is Firiday night football.
Through it the people can still have the very special — an event, a shared experience of tremendous emotion, athletic achievement, and vicarious thrills, anodyne from September to near Christmas, if the team made the playoffs, to a shriveled, diminished life of no future and no opportunities the rest of the year.
Friday Night Lights takes place during the elder Bush’s run for President against Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Nothing has changed between then and now except for the fact that the American economy is much much worse for all except those at the very top.
Unsurprisingly, Odessa was no place for the Democratic Party.
In Odessa, Michael Dukakis was the candidate for “homos,” a “minority of sexual perverts.” He was a socialist who ignited “fear that he would take away the rights of people to protect themselves against violent intruders, fear that he would ruin the economy, fear that the only people who would beneift from his administration would be the poor, while they, the hardworking guts of the country got sold down the river.”
Familiar?
In the book the elder Bush makes a brief campaign appearance in the Odessa area. George H. W. Bush, like Mitt Romney in West Hazelton today, was no more like the people than the all-destroying Martians were like the narrator in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. (To be fair, Bush had lived in Odessa for a short period after WWII when he was in the independent oil business.)
“Their belief in [George H. W. Bush] seemed ironic, even crazy,” writes Bissinger in Friday Night Lights.
“[The economy] of Midlands-Odessa had fallen apart during the Reagan-Bush administration, and it was hard to think of any other single area of the country that had suffered as much … The statistics were numbing. in 1986 the unemployment shot up to 20 percent. The number of bankruptcies filed with the federal court in Midland shot up 65 percent.”
In the book, the arrival of the elder Bush is met with near hysteria, virtually, but not quite, the same support inspired by the Permian High football team.
“[Bush] created the image of a country that was still as good, as fundamentally sound as it had been in the fifties, when [he] and thousands of others had watched the American Dream blossom before their eyes …” writes the author.
That place no longer existed, Bissinger dryly observed. The GOP candidate created an “amazing illusion.” The people of Odessa wanted and needed it, anything to lift the spirit and assuage the desperation.
And that’s what Mitt Romney, an unprincipled liar and brazenly unlikeable oligarch from the upper atmosphere of the ruling class, works in eastern PA.
Size of check recently written to Romney campaign by kook right wing billionaire — $10 million.
That would buy most of what’s left north of Philly between Quakertown and West Hazelton.
“Some Romney advisers sound especially bullish, with one positing that a big win by their side is now more likely than a narrow Obama victory …” — TIME
Coincidentally, Paul Krugman has a blog post on Texas and the state recession caused by a collapse in oil prices and the S&L banking scandal in the late Eighties, the period in Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger devotes nearly a chapter to discussing the people and the economy of Odessa in relation to it.
The first order of business for Mr. Romney should be to let Latinos know that the GOP wants all people to succeed to the very best of their abilities, unencumbered by the heavy and draconian foot of Fedzillacrats who believe they know what is best for people …
Mr. Romney should continue to press for education reform, and remind Latino voters that education is vital to success. He should illustrate the importance that Americans of Asia-Pacific descent place on education and how fast their children move into the middle class. It doesn’t have to be an Asian thing …
Mr. Romney should continue to remind Latinos that the GOP is not anti-immigration or racist …
Unintentionally hilarious, the Republican Party has stopped beating the wife, sez Ted. Straighten up and fly right like the “Asia-Pacifics”.
Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure does a takedown of the Flame virus here.
It’s not really a takedown although the introduction is, as a teaser. The post is a good brief summary and discussion list of escalating technical points — follow the links — leading to the conclusion that, hmm, Flame was really not so lame, the opposite of the post title. (This is called burying the lede.)
When the Flame malware was found two weeks ago, it was characterized as ‘Highly advanced’, ‘Supermalware’ and ‘The biggest malware in history’.
These comments were immediately met with ridicule from experts who were quick to point out that there was nothing particularly new or interesting in Flame.
In fact, the only unique thing in Flame seemed to be its large size. Even that was not too exciting …
Recommended. You have to read all of it. Helps if you have some familiarity with the subject, too. (Of course, this is likely all wasted on a standard audience which, largely, has very little idea about what’s under the hood in malware.)
Discussions on the technical merits of viruses, or the lack of them, have been around as long as the anti-virus industry. Beauty varies depending on the vantage point and the eye of the beholder.
New viruses have always been described as super when first discovered, particularly if they become a handle to great publicity.
As the news piles higher, so does their alleged superior technical quality.
Indeed, this is what the news media loves to hear. It makes the story all the more urgent and exciting. The hearts of editors and journalists swell for they are the ones getting the message out on the newest thing to turn the world upside down.
The Cryptic Morgue underground bulletin board system had a copy of the Mutation Engine which Newsweek reporters had mentioned in hysterical tones on March 6, the day of the Michelangelo virus’s activation in 1992, That virus had turned out to be something of a bust but, “beware the next round of computer viruses!” wrote the reporters,
I thought this was rather amusing. High school kids running a bulletin board system from their bedroom in Texas had access to “the scariest new virus … the Mutation Engine,” but Newsweek’s information gatherers didn’t. They’d just heard about it.
And the Mutation Engine wasn’t a virus. The Mutation Engine, or MtE for short, was a segment of code which provided any computer virus that used it with variable encryption, but only theoretically.
In practice the MtE was too difficult to use although the idea for its type of viral masking proliferated around the world.
The leading anti-virus vendor McAfee Associates showed the Mutation Engine to Steve Gibson — an excitable writer for the computer magazine Infoworld. He panicked publicly in a May column: “It is clear that the game is forever changed,” he wrote. The sophistication of the Mutation Engine is amazing and staggering.”
Gibson’s words made great quotes, perfect for anti-virus software releases. Central Point Software used the specter of the Mutation Engine in its direct advertising. Indeed, so did McAfee. Why should they not?
Vince McKiernan, a McAfee Associates vice president claimed, “We expect that the Mutation Engine will increase [the virus] problem exponentially for those with unprotected systems.”
Of course, if you a copy of SCAN by McAfee it was a different matter.
“Actually, we cracked this some engine some months ago and have been shipping product capable of detecting the Mutation Engine since March.”
As trade for access to virus bulletin board systems I wrote two variant viruses using the Mutation Engine. One was called CryptLab — which eventually was mentioned very briefly in a book called Approaching Zero, and one called Insufficient Memory which was included in one of the early issues of the e-zine, Crypt Newsletter.
They were used as barter for access to virus libraries. As actual spreading examples, Mutation Engine viruses weren’t successful. Jacking the code into new viruses was just too clumsy a task.
Because anti-virus companies used it as publicity, the had effective cures for it relatively quickly. That made use of it in new viruses pointless.
However, the technology it exploited was not pointless. In varying ways, it became widespread in computer virus programming.
How would one rate that? Superior? Sophisticated? Ahead of its time? Or just another thing to be summarily dealt with. It all depended on your outlook.
Jeff Moss, a prominent hacking expert who sits on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council, said that it was difficult to persuade talented people with technical skills to enter the field because it can be a thankless task.
“If you really look at security, it’s like trying to prove a negative. If you do security well, nobody comes and says ‘good job.’ You only get called when things go wrong” …
Moss, who goes by the hacker name Dark Tangent, said that he sees no end to the labor shortage …
U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp on Monday launched the first undergraduate honors program in cybersecurity with the University of Maryland to help train more workers for the burgeoning field.
Sean Sullivan, from F-Secure, said: “[Flame is] interesting and complex, but not sleek and stealthy. It could be the work of a military contractor — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other contractors are developing programs like these for different intelligence services. To call it a cyberweapon says more about Kaspersky’s cold war mentality than anything else. It has to be taken with a grain of salt.???
Not enough science and math majors, it reads. Boo-fucking hoo.
There are plenty of educated scientists in the US, just not precisely the ones these types of stories always pine for. Plus, there’s the private sector unwillingness to train on its own dime.
