The commercial casts Mitt Romney’s business background in a severely negative light, but it's not a typical slash-and-burn attack ad. Instead, it features former GST Steel employee Joe Soptic speaking to the camera about what happened when the plant where he worked shut down. "I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant. I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely changed," Soptic said. “When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care and my family lost their health care. And a short time after that my wife became ill.”
Andrea Saul cited Romneycare approvingly, conservatives rightly piled on, and Romney supporters are defending the guy. “You’re hurting him,” cried one.
“Thanks for making this the big story of the day, Jackass,” cried another.
Andrea Saul made this the big story of the day. She is hurting Romney. She is an official voice of the campaign. This was an unforced error of monumental idiocy and the blowback is deserved, appropriate, and -- most importantly -- absolutely necessary.
What conservatives are doing re Andrea Saul's comment is the same as how you housebreak your dog. Romney needs to know not to go there.
The MMP’s reports are freely available to anyone through its website, http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu. But statistics can be sterile things. Get Massey going, and one gets an earful about the true state of affairs along the border. To wit: * We are not being flooded with illegal Mexican migrants. The total number of migrants from Mexico has varied very little since the 1950s. The massive influx many have written about never happened. * Net illegal migration has stopped almost completely. * Illegal migration has not stopped because of stricter border enforcement, which Massey characterizes as a waste of money at best and counterproductive at worst. * There are indeed more undocumented Mexicans living in the United States than there were 20 years ago, but that is because fewer migrants are returning home — not because more are sneaking into the country. * And the reason that fewer Mexican citizens are returning home is because we have stepped up border enforcement so dramatically. Mull over that last point for a minute. If Congress had done nothing to secure the border over the last two decades — if it had just left the border alone — there might be as many as 2 million fewer Mexicans living in the United States today, Massey believes.
| Aug 17-20, St Petersburg SF&F Assembly Rapture of the Nerds tour with Charlie Stross |
We taped the whole thing back up again and I got it to the office in the back of a taxi. Once here, I grabbed a knife and set the crate down on a revolting, sodden sofa some miscreant dumped in the parking lot, thinking that whatever the box spilled out onto that wreck could only improve it. As I sliced away the bubble-wrap again, the crate completely fell to pieces, revealing an upside-down wooden coffin. I'd opened it from the bottom! Digging through the greenish soil (which was odorless, though it did leave powdery smears on my clothes), I discovered that the top of the box sported some live sod, and under that, a piece of semi-rotted burlap that semi-protected the coffin's lid, which was intricately laser-cut with an 18th-century date and a monstrous icon. Dusting off the coffin, I brought it back into the office, scraping as much of the crate's remnants as I could into the dumpster. 
Prising the lid off the coffin, I discovered an absolutely gorgeous soft poseable maquette of a zombie from ParaNorman, the forthcoming Laika film. ParaNorman was clutching a rolled up scroll with a hand-written note telling me about the movie and making some shrewd guesses about how I'd relate to it. I generally find elaborate PR stuff to be kind of tedious -- like getting torrents of the cheeziest SkyMall tchotchkes in the mail. But the ParaNorman folks really know what they're about. It was pretty gutsy to send me a giant box of dirt with a doll in it, and the doll needed to be extremely cool to overcome the automatic inward groan at the thought of having to deal with a massive MOOP spill when I opened the crate. There are a million ways that this could have misfired, but it didn't. Bravo, seriously. As for the movie? Hell, I don't know. I was a big fan of Laika's treatment of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, so I would have gone to see this even without the weird-ass, amazing press kit. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have hyped the movie beforehand, so they're doing something right. I don't know what I would do if every PR pitch came with a package this elaborate -- I'd end up drowning in potting soil, for one thing. But this is the most creative and awesome thing I've ever gotten in the mail, and they've earned this post. Here's the trailer: 
| Aug 17-20, St Petersburg SF&F Assembly Rapture of the Nerds tour with Charlie Stross |
Debbie Cook was in for only 7 weeks in 2007, but her experience was brutal. She testified that Miscavige had two hulking guards climb into her office through a window as she was talking to him on the phone. "Goodbye" he told her as she was hauled off to the gulag. Like Rinder, she described a place where dozens of men and women were confined to what had been a set of offices. Cook testified that the place was ant-infested, and during one two-week stretch in the summer with temperatures over 100 degrees, Miscavige had the air conditioning turned off as punishment. Food was brought up in a vat riding on a golf cart. Cook described it as a barely edible "slop" that was fed to them morning, noon, and night. Longtime residents of the Hole began to look gaunt. They had to find places on the floor or on desks to sleep at night. Rinder said there were so many of them they slept only inches from each other, and having to get up in the middle of the night was a nightmare of stepping over sleeping figures in the dark. In the morning, they were marched out of the offices and through a tunnel under Gilman Springs Road to a large building with communal showers. They were then marched back to the Hole, and during the day would be compelled to take part in mass confessions. During these, Rinder says people he had considered friends would put on a show for the officials overseeing them, trying to outdo each other with vile accusations against each other. Cook testified that Miscavige wanted Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre, two of his longest-serving and highest-ranking officials, to confess to having a homosexual affair. The men were beaten until they made some forced admissions. When Cook objected to what was happening, she herself was made to stand in a trash can for twelve hours while insults were hurled at her, she was called a lesbian, and water was dumped on her head.
The commercial casts Mitt Romney’s business background in a severely negative light, but it's not a typical slash-and-burn attack ad. Instead, it features former GST Steel employee Joe Soptic speaking to the camera about what happened when the plant where he worked shut down. "I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant. I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely changed," Soptic said. “When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care and my family lost their health care. And a short time after that my wife became ill.”
Air & Space Smithsonian invited Sims creator Will Wright to imagine the first communities on Mars. Here's an excerpt from his vision of Marstown, population 8,000, in 2047: Like most colonists, Sasha had made the decision to move to Mars for the sake of her descendants. Seeing only limited opportunities on Earth and having a strong sense of adventure and duty, she had been captivated by the ratification of the Mars Development Treaty of 2032. Dwindling natural resources and massive environmental disruption had encouraged politicians on Earth to look to Mars as a long-term lifeboat, another foothold for humanity in the face of an uncertain future. The Mars Treaty essentially privatized about half of the Martian surface, rewarding those willing to relocate there with huge plots of land. While that land was nearly worthless today, the hope they all carried was that one day it would be a valuable legacy to pass on to their children and grandchildren. Sasha was in the third wave of colonists; the first group of 500 had been transported to Mars eight years earlier. The colony now numbered about 8,000, the primary limits to the population being the cost of transportation from Earth—which was covered by the Mars Development Corporation (MDC)—and the extent of the hydroponic gardens within the tube complex. The MDC represented a consortium of investors from national governments and international funds (vying for long-term territorial and mineral rights) and individual billionaires (with more idealistic motives
