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Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Tuesday's Daily Brief

Tuesday, November 8, 2011
POLITICS
Cain Accuser Stands Ground As Questions Fly
SPORTS
Boxing Legend Joe Frazier Dies
WORLD
Sarkozy Reportedly Blasts Israeli PM As 'Liar'
BUSINESS
Major Swiss Bank To Disclose Names Of U.S. Clients Suspected Of Tax Evasion
TECHNOLOGY
Researcher Finds Huge iPhone Security Bug
BLOG POSTS
Al Gore: History Is Made in Australia
This is a historic moment. Australia's Parliament has put the nation's first carbon price into law. With this vote, the world has turned a pivotal corner in the collective effort to solve the climate crisis.
Dr. Andrew Weil: 10 Ways to Have a Happier Life
Bear in mind that by "happy," I am not referring to endless bliss. Despite what many in the media proclaim these days, such a state is neither achievable nor desirable.
Eve Ensler: Ambiguous UpSparkles From the Heart of the Park: Mic Check/Occupy Wall Street (Part 3)
It was cold this week in Zuccotti Park, so we occupiers huddled together on the concrete steps for warmth, to make it easier to hear, to allow the stories to pass amongst us and through us. We repeated each line of each person's story and the repeating kept us warm.
Gabriel A. Feldman: The Legal Issues Behind the NBA Players' Decertification Strategy
From an NBA fan's perspective, the hope now is that the uncertainty and risk to both sides involved with decertification and an antitrust suit are enough to push the two sides to make a deal at the bargaining table.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: Conrad Murray's Conviction Has Left Everyone Else Off the Hook
In the final analysis, Conrad Murray was the person was most responsible for Michael's death. But a host of others played a significant role. They ought to thank their lucky stars that the sins of the many have fallen on the shoulders of one.
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URGENT FY 12 BUDGET ACTION! CALL YOUR LEGISLATORS IN SPRINGFIELD TODAY!!

 
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Urgent FY12 Budget Action Alert
CALL YOUR LEGISLATORS IN SPRINGFIELD TODAY!
Dear Fred, 
 
The Illinois General Assembly is heading back to Springfield today for the second and final week of the fall Veto Session. This is our last chance to convince the legislature to restore funding for addiction prevention, treatment and recovery services this year!  Please take a moment TODAY to call your state Senator and state Representative in their Springfield offices and leave them this message:
 
Please act this week to re-allocate funds to restore addiction prevention, treatment and recovery services funding.  At [your agency], we have [closed programs, reduced services, laid off  how many staff] as a result of these unanticipated cuts.  We need your support to continue to provide valuable addiction healthcare services in YOUR community.  Please act now to re-allocate funds to restore these devastating cuts.  THANK YOU!
THANK YOU for your continued efforts to advocate for restoration of funding for addiction prevention, treatment and recovery services!  
 
Sincerely,
 
Sara M. Howe, CEO
Illinois Alcoholism & Drug Dependence Association
 
 
 
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Illinois Alcoholism & Drug Dependence Association | 937 South Second Street | Springfield | IL | 62704


Joe Frazier, Former Heavyweight Boxing Champ, Dies at 67 - Yahoo! News

Joe Frazier, Former Heavyweight Boxing Champ, Dies at 67 - Yahoo! News:

Joe Frazier, Former Heavyweight Boxing Champ, Dies at 67

Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight boxing champ who died of liver cancer on Nov. 7 at 67, won't go down in history as the greatest fighter of all time. Muhammad Ali, the man with whom Frazier sparred so epically, both inside and outside the ropes, owns that distinction. Frazier's role in his rival's outsize life will always define his own legacy: it's impossible to mention "Smokin' Joe" without summoning Ali a few seconds later.

But if Ali defined Frazier, well, Frazier made Ali too. If not for Frazier's greatness — his left hook crumbled opponents, and he defended his heavyweight title four times from 1970 to '73 — Ali could never have been called the Greatest. And though the annals of boxing won't remember him as the better fighter, at times Frazier could be the bigger man.(See photos of Frazier's life.)

Ali feared Frazier, and that insecurity brought out the worst in him. During the height of their rivalry in the racially charged post-civil-rights 1970s, Ali belittled Frazier whenever he could. He'd call Frazier an "Uncle Tom," "ignorant," "the Gorilla." In black communities, Ali characterized Frazier as the white man's champ. "I'm not just fightin' one man," Ali bellowed before their first bout, in 1971, the "Fight of the Century" at New York City's Madison Square Garden. "I'm fightin' a lot of men, showin' a lot of 'em here is one man they couldn't conquer. My mission is to bring freedom to 30 million black people. I'll win this fight because I've got a cause. Frazier has no cause. He's in it for the money alone." (Frazier won the bout in a 15-round decision.)

Frazier, who was inelegant, introspective and prone to mood swings that he called the slouchies, rarely rose to Ali's bait. "I don't want to be no more than no more than what I am," he once said. Friends wondered whether Frazier paid any mind to the social injustices that Ali harped on. Ali relished his role as cultural provocateur; his preaching, as much as his pugilism, is why he is revered. Still, Ali never had reason to use Frazier as a comic foil, especially since the shots he took were far from funny. "Ali can't touch me," Frazier said, "in ability or decency."

Joe Frazier grew up in Beaufort, S.C., where he was raised in a four-room shack on a farm, the second youngest of 13 children. He threw his first punches against a feed bag stuffed with rags, hung from an oak tree. Frazier told his siblings he'd be the next Joe Louis. "I'd hit that heavy bag for an hour at a time," he once said. "I'd wrap my hands with a necktie of my Daddy's, or a stocking of my Momma's or sister's, and get to it." At school, kids would give him a quarter or a sandwich to walk with them as a repellent against bullies.(See the top 10 boxing matches of all time.)

Ali portrayed Frazier as some sort of puppet of the white man, but in truth, Jim Crow sent Frazier fleeing from South Carolina. "Son," Frazier's mother told him, "if y'all can't get along with the white man in the South, y'all better leave home." A teenage Frazier hitchhiked to Charleston and, as he said, "caught the first thing smokin' that was goin' north." Frazier settled in Philadelphia, where he took a job as a butcher in a kosher slaughterhouse. He caught the eye of a fight manager at a local Police Athletic League, and lost only one of his amateur fights, to Buster Mathis at the trials for the 1964 Olympics. Mathis got hurt, however, and the trip to the Tokyo Games fell to Frazier. Despite fighting his final match with a broken thumb, Frazier came home with the heavyweight gold.

The medal didn't make Frazier rich: after Tokyo, he took a job as a janitor in a North Philadelphia Baptist church. But he soon found some financial backing and turned pro in 1965. With Ali stripped of his boxing license because of his refusal to serve in Vietnam, Frazier soared through the heavyweight ranks and won the world title in 1970. But that same year, Ali returned to the ring; their first face-off — "the Fight of the Century" — came on March 8, 1971.

TIME wrote before the fight: "No amount of bluster is likely to deter Smokin' Joe, a raging, bobbing, weaving, rolling swarmer who moves in one basic direction-right at his opponent's gut. A kind of motorized Marciano, he works his short arms like pistons, pumping away with such mechanical precision that he consistently throws between 54 and 58 punches each round. He works almost exclusively inside, crouching and always moving in to slam the body. When the pummeling begins to slow his opponent, when the guard drops to protect the stomach, Frazier tosses a murderous left hook to the head. His coup de grâce is lethal. 'Getting hit by Joe,' says Light Heavyweight Ray Anderson, one of Frazier's sparring partners, 'is like getting run over by a bus.' Some of his victims, like Light Heavyweight Champion Bob Foster, literally have no recollection of what hit them." (See TIME's Thrilla in Manila coverage.)

In typically understated fashion, Ali labeled the fight "the biggest sporting event in the history of the whole planet earth." It was the first time two undefeated heavyweight champs had met for the title. Ed Sullivan, Alan Shepard, Bill Cosby, Michael Caine, Hubert Humphrey and Burt Bacharach were among the luminaries at ringside. Frank Sinatra took pictures for LIFE magazine. The fight lived up to the billing. Frazier, the body puncher, came out swinging for Ali's head. Ali, the ring dancer, tried matching Frazier hook-for-hook. Ali turned up the showmanship: he invited Frazier to swing at his gut, and when Frazier connected, he'd shake his head, as if a little kid were punching him. "Nooo contest," Ali crowed at one point.

In the 11th round, however, Frazier pummeled Ali with two left hooks. Ali staggered and barely survived the round. In the 15th and final stanza, Frazier landed one more roundhouse left, sending Ali to the canvas. He got back up, but by that point it was finished: Frazier won the fight on a unanimous decision.

It was the only time he beat Ali. Frazier lost his championship belt to George Foreman, who knocked Frazier down six times before the ref stopped their 1973 title fight in the second round ("Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!" Howard Cosell memorably cried.) The next year, Ali got his rematch with Frazier, and won it in a decision to set up their rubber match, in Manila, on Oct. 1, 1975. The "Thrilla in Manila," took place in 100°F heat before an estimated 700 million closed-circuit and television viewers in some 65 countries. It became the duo's most famous brawl. Frazier refused to wear down, but by the 14th round, Ali was pounding him at will. Frazier's eyes were almost swollen shut. Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, threw in the towel at the end of the round. "I want him, boss," Frazier screamed. Futch refused. "It's all over," Futch replied. "No one will forget what you did here today." He was right. Afterward, Ali said he had never felt closer to death. He described Frazier as "the greatest fighter of all time, next to me."

Frazier lost to Foreman one more time, in 1976, and attempted an early 1980s comeback, thankfully short-lived. He started a musical act, Smokin' Joe and the Knockouts; that didn't last long either. He opened up a gym in North Philadelphia, and like too many ex-fighters he fell on hard times. "Over the years, Frazier has lost a fortune through a combination of his own generosity and naïveté," read a 2006 profile in the New York Times, "his carousing, failed business opportunities and deep hatred for his former chief boxing rival, Muhammad Ali."

After their fighting days, Frazier matched Ali's past unseemliness with some hurtful remarks of his own. "Look at him now," Frazier told writer Thomas Hauser for his 1992 book on Ali. "He's damaged goods. I know it; you know it. Everyone knows it ... He was always making fun of me. I'm the dummy; I'm the one getting hit in the head. Tell me now, him or me: Which one talks worse now?" In 1996, after Ali lit the Olympic torch at the Atlanta Games, Frazier told a group of reporters, "I wish Ali had fallen into [the flame]. If I had the chance, I'd have pushed him in." Such comments did not endear Frazier to any corporate sponsors.

But in recent years, Frazier's bitterness faded. "Nobody has anything but good things to say about Muhammad now," Frazier told SI.com in 2009. "I'd do anything he needed for me to help." A few years ago, the pair conducted a photo shoot together at Frazier's gym, which is now shuttered. The day before Frazier's death, Ali said in a statement: "My family and I are keeping Joe and his family in our daily prayers. Joe has a lot of friends pulling for him, and I'm one of them."

Frazier lost this last fight. But in so many others, he thrilled the world.

Mitt Romney as the Nominee: Conservatism Dies and Barack Obama Wins | RedState

Mitt Romney as the Nominee: Conservatism Dies and Barack Obama Wins | RedState:

Mitt Romney as the Nominee: Conservatism Dies and Barack Obama Wins


Mit Romney will not go on Special Report with Brett Baier to answer the tough questions as the other candidates have done. No worries. Conservatives will bitch and moan for a few days and Romney will claim it was a scheduling issue, he’d always meant to go on, and he will go on.

Should Mitt Romney win the Presidency, conservatives will find this pattern play out repeated. Romney will head in a direction conservatives do not like and they will bitch and moan repeatedly and maybe, just maybe, he’ll part his hair in their direction.

We’ve seen this play out over and over. Jon Huntsman comes up with the best economic plan of all the candidates, Herman Cain follows up with 999, Perry comes out with a flat tax, and Romney refuses to do anything. Until he does something.

Mitt Romney is not the George W. Bush of 2012 — he is the Harriet Miers of 2012, only conservative because a few conservative grand pooh-bahs tell us Mitt Romney is conservative and for no other reason.

That is precisely why Mitt Romney will not win in 2012. But no worry, once he loses, Republican establishment types will blame conservatives for not doing enough for Mitt Romney, never mind that Mitt Romney has never been able to sell himself to more than 25% of the GOP voters. It’s not his fault though, it is the 75%’s fault.

Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.

Why Romney Will Be The Nominee

Mitt Romney will be the nominee because the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot.

The base will not forgive Rick Perry his immigration sins. In fact, that has hurt him far more than his debate performances, but his debate performances have hurt him badly. Perry, who came out principled and fiery with a record others could only envy, has left others with the impression that he’s a poor man’s version of the village idiot, which in the SEC we call “Aggies”. Maybe he can turn it around.

Newt Gingrich will not be the nominee because, despite his daughter’s rebuttals to the horror stories of how Gingrich divorced his first of three wives, Jackie Gingrich told theWashington Post on January 3, 1985, “He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery.”

Gingrich went on to cheat on the second wife with the third. Regardless of the actual facts or even the spin, he won’t win women.

Herman Cain won’t be the nominee because he can’t win women either. Regardless of what you think of the Politico story, Cain’s handling of the story has been an epic disaster. He’s down at least 10 points with women in Iowa. He’s falling even further and doesn’t even realize it. He’s largely been emboldened by a conservative media that is so used to standing by its men that too few are telling Herman that he is now at the point where he must actually sit and answer questions whether he wants to or not and whether he feels maligned or not and whether I think he should have to or not. If he loses women by as big as he is starting to lose the women, he cannot win.

So Mitt Romney will be the nominee. Conservatives will not rally together with the least of the bad alternatives and Romney, like John McCain before him, will run up the middle to the nomination. But, just like McCain, Romney will not beat Barack Obama.

Why Mitt Romney Will Not Beat Barack Obama

You’d think that given the economy, jobs, and the present angst about the direction of the country that the GOP would have an easy path to victory. You would be wrong.

You forget the electoral college. The vote is coming down to a handful of states and Barack Obama still maintains the advantage of incumbency and not terribly terrible polling in those swing states.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man.

I’ve been reading the 200 pages of single spaced opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides. He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled. The man has no core beliefs other than in himself. You want him to be tough? He’ll be tough. You want him to be sensitive? He’ll be sensitive. You want him to be for killing the unborn? He’ll go all in on abortion rights until he wants to run for an office where it is not in his advantage.

Along the way, he’ll drop lots of coin to grease the skids for himself. Mitt Romney is the silly putty of politicians — press on him real hard and he’ll take on whatever image you press into him until the next group starts pressing.

Republican billionaires have a fantastic track record of getting Republican opinion leaders to support them and an even better track record at losing elections. Mitt Romney will be no different.

To beat Barack Obama, a candidate must paint a bold contrast with the Democrats on their policies. When Mitt Romney tries, Barack Obama will be able to show that just the other day Mitt Romney held exactly the opposite position as the one he holds today.

Voters may not like Barack Obama, but by the time Obama is done with Romney they will not trust Mitt Romney. And voters would rather the guy they don’t like than they guy they don’t trust.

Why Conservatism Will Die

Conservatism is already dying. Republicans on Capitol Hill are about to raise taxes on the American people with this Super Committee, but they’ll say they are just “raising revenue,” not taxes. Conservatives will give them a pass as they have on virtually every other major issue. Conservatives keep giving passes to people who shouldn’t be given passes because conservative in Washington have been there so long, they’d much rather get invited to the cocktail parties and avoid awkward encounters.

Washington, D.C. conservatives will also rally around Mitt Romney, just as they kept doing over and over and over with George W. Bush even after steel tariffs in Pennsylvania, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, the GM Bailout, and TARP. At some point the public will cease taking conservatives seriously when the most prominent conservatives — those in Washington who pose as the faces, voices, and writers of the conservative movement at large, keep throwing their lot in with a guy who keeps selling out the very principles conservatives claim to hold dear.

Some conservatives, of course, will not go all in for Romney. These conservatives will be blamed by major Republican and “conservative” mouth pieces for not doing enough to help Mitt Romney. They will be alienated, blamed, and made the scapegoat for the failures of the establishment GOP.

But there is something else too — Mitt Romney is winning the nomination without conservative help. The only time he pays conservatives any attention is when they cry loud enough that the media takes notice and Romney decides the story needs to go away. Once he is the nominee, it will be all about wooing the independents.

Hell, he can give the base Marco Rubio as the veep nominee, just like McCain did with Palin — a token for the base. But don’t delude yourself into thinking he will seriously take conservatives seriously. He got the nomination without them and he’ll only use them when it is opportunistically convenient for him.

Conservatism itself will not really die. But it might as well be dead as even conservatives in the heartland of the country stop taking Washington conservatives seriously.

The Contrast To Be Drawn

It is striking to me that in 2012 there is broad based popular angst against Wall Street and Washington and the Republican Party is on the verge of nominating a multi-millionaire scion of the Rockefeller Wing of the Republican Party whose closest encounters with the common man are accidentally touching one of the many hired hands in one of the many rooms of one of his many mansions. But then many of the DC-NYC Republican “conservatives” who support Romney are the same, only coming into contact with regular people when they are served their breakfast by a steward in the first class car on the Acela Express.

Neither Romney nor the Washington GOP crowd who loves him have very much at all in common with fly over country conservatives who see the GOP and Democrats both as out to lunch tools of K-Street and Wall Street. The party that could lead a conservative, populist campaign against Wall Street and Barack Obama, the former getting fat off the latter, will instead nominate a guy more at home on Wall Street than Main Street.

And enough conservatives will be cheerleaders and rally around him that by November of 2012 the ideological underpinnings of the modern American conservative movement will be coming apart.

I’m starting to think I need to walk it back on my rejection of Jon Huntsman. Because I’m starting to think even he would be more faithful in his conservative convictions than Mitt Romney.