Roundtable Part II: Default Impact | Video – ABC News

George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Paul Krugman, and Grover Norquist.

Roundtable Part II: Default Impact | Video – AB…, posted with vodpod

Roundtable Part I: Budget Endgame | Video – ABC News

George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Paul Krugman, and Grover Norquist.

Roundtable Part I: Budget Endgame | Video – ABC…, posted with vodpod

Farewell to July 2011

(yes, I bought a copy of this photo)

Imagine my surprise when I saw today’s paper; yes, that is me getting a high five from Theresa after “finishing” an ugly 3 mile (4.8 km) cross country run on Friday night.

More on the story:

PEORIA —

Same as a few special days each fall during cross country season, a 3-mile foot race was held at Detweiller Park on Friday.

But this was Detweiller at Dark, a first-time summer run that had the venerable Detweiller course lit up with 60,000 watts of portable construction lights.

“Any race held on the (high school) state cross country course, you’re going to have people from all over who want to run it,” race co-director Adam White said. “At night, with the course lit up, that kind of gives it a unique twist.”

All proceeds went to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

White and Mike Helgeson organized and coordinated what they hope will become an annual event.

Helgeson, a Dunlap cross country assistant coach, in previous years held an organized run to benefit the JDRF. White owns Running Central and created the Main Street Mile, another recent addition to Peoria’s running scene.

“Mike and I got to talking and we thought, with each of our resources, maybe we could put together something special for the runners and raise even more money for juvenile diabetes,” White said.

They hoped to have 500 participants. More than that signed up and ran.

The first of two events was a 2.1-mile race for boys and girls ages 13 and under, held just after sunset.[...]

So, what about today’s workout?
Well, it was 81 F with 82 percent humidity; I just about died during the first 4 miles (especially the first 2). That section took me 42:37 to do (jogging). Then I turned around and walked the last 4 miles at a steady but slow pace (1:01:48; just under 15:30 mpm). I went fast enough to not injure my hip but slow enough to enjoy it.

But when I finished, I was drenched. I mean, drenched; I couldn’t have been wetter had I jumped in a pond.

Posts
Michelle Bachmann:

GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann (R) has been in hot water in recent weeks for personally taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government aid while denouncing the very programs she benefited from. Most recently, the Washington Post discovered that Bachmann and her husband signed for a $417,000 home loan backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac just weeks before she called for the two mortgage giants to be entirely dismantled.

Bachmann has been a consistently fierce critic of mortgage lending programs and has advocated abolishing the government sponsored mortgage enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet she took out the maximum possible loan from those programs to finance her family’s move to a lavish 5,200-square-foot home on a golf course.

During an appearance this afternoon at the National Press Club, Bachmann gave a highly ironic defense of her use of federal home loans:

MODERATOR: I got a lot of questions from people asking is it fair for you to call for dismantling federal programs you ultimately have been a beneficiary of? So in terms of guaranteeing home mortgages, do you think the federal government has a role in that…?

BACHMANN: Now unlike all of you, who I’m sure pay cash for your homes, there are people out there like myself who actually have to go to a bank and get a mortgage. And this is the problem. It’s almost impossible to buy a home in this country today without the federal government being involved. Whether it is with the FHA, whether it’s with Fannie, whether it’s with Freddie, it’s almost impossible to buy a home…What’s important is that we do dismantle a number of these federal programs that everyone agrees are clearly out of control.

What she probably meant by her statement: if one tried to get any loan at all, it was all but impossible to find a loan that wasn’t touched in some way by a government program. She seems to think that if the government weren’t involved at all, then one could find a loan that was not touched by the government. (uh, probably NOT; that is why these programs were created…but…)

Even worse was her zombie-lie claim that Freddie and Fannie were the cause of the mortgage crisis. It wasn’t. What happens is that the lying conservatives try to bundle Freddie and Fannie with other non-regulated subprime loans and claim that the bad ones came from this pot:

As Konczal says, all of this stuff relies on a form of three-card monte: you talk about “subprime and other high-risk” loans, lumping subprime with other loans that are not, it turns out, anywhere near as risky as actual subprime; then use this essentially fake aggregate to make it seem as if Fannie/Freddie were actually at the core of the problem.

But was this self-conscious? Do these people know what they’re doing?

Yes.

More here.

CNN.com Video

Watch the latest breaking news, politics, entertainment and offbeat videos everyone is talking about at CNN.com. Get informed now!

CNN.com Video, posted with vodpod