Just too many things and too little time. Computer woes, family discord, financial worries, annoying little tasks that MUST be done, life’s ordinary foibles. And its been over 95 degrees for many days in a row.
Just wanted to let you know.
“Hello?? Hello????”, Eyeore moaned, although he knew no one was ever listening,
Today the Romney-Ryan campaign came out with a new ad blasting the Affordable Care Act’s cost offsets, specifically its Medicare cuts and its tax increases.
WONKBLOG – By Dylan Matthews on August 22, 2012
Let’s take the claims here one by one.
Obama is raiding $716 billion from Medicare…– This one’s true. The most recent CBO analysis of the Affordable Care Act, released last month, estimated the 10-year Medicare cuts in the bill at $740 billion, so if anything the ad’s number is low.
…changing the program forever.– Also likely true. You can’t cut $740 billion from a program without changing it a whole lot. To recap, the cuts consist mainly in cuts to Medicare Advantage, which partners with private insurers and actually ends up increasing costs, and in hospital reimbursement rates, which hospitals agreed to in exchange for the influx of customers that comes with the bill’s implementation. In the past, reimbursement cuts have hurt quality at some hospitals, though the previous cuts were much larger than those in Affordable Care Act. So the bill does change Medicare, but how much and in what ways is yet to be determined.
Taxing wheelchairs and pacemakers… - Also true. The ad is referring here to the ACA’s 2.3 percent tax on sales of certain medical devices, which is set to take effect later this year. The law includes a “retail exemption,” which excludes items you can typically just buy at a store, such as glasses, contact lenses, or hearing aids. But it does include wheelchairs and pacemakers. A Bloomberg Government analysis predicted the bill would curb spending on such devices, albeit mildly. The provision’s defenders, such as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), note that devices affected by the tax amount to under 1 percent of total health care spending, and thus dispute the significance of the tax. But it’s real and works as the ad describes.
…and raising taxes on families making less than $120,000 - True in particulars but not necessarily in practice. The ad is referring here to the CBO’s finding (pdf) that 76 percent of those paying the penalty under the individual mandate fall under 500 percent of the poverty line, or $120,000 for a family of four. There are other provisions that hit non-high earners as well. The medical device tax, for instance, raises costs for pacemaker and wheelchair users making under $120,000 a year. The tax on tanning booths hit low-income tanning afficionados, and the limits on flexible spending accounts and Health Savings Accounts hit across the board. But the law’s tax increases are generally quite progressive. The excise tax on expensive health plans only applies to plans costing more than $27,500 for a family of four, which only the very rare middle-income family reaches. The law increases the Medicare payroll tax by 0.9 percentage points for income over $200,000, and imposes a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for families with gross income of $250,000 or more. And the bill’s insurance premium tax credits, which make up the bulk of the coverage provisions, are quite progressive as well. Thus for many families, the tax credit will overwhelm any increases in medical device or tanning costs, and the bill will be an overall tax cut for them.
Unfortunately, neither the Joint Committee on Taxation nor a reputable private group has done a detailed distributional analysis to see exactly how much each income group would see taxes rise or fall.
“The Romney-Ryan plan will restore Medicare funding and restore and strengthen the program for the next generation.” - The campaign has indeed reversed course from Ryan’s budget and pledged to reverse the Affordable Care Act’s cuts. Their own plan’s effects on the program are less clear. Experts say reversing the cuts could hasten the program’s insolvency, and CBPP estimates that premium support plans, specifically the one proposed by Ryan in 2011, could raise premiums for seniors by an average of $6,350. The potential for such a plan to cut costs overall is also very much in doubt. As Peter Orszagnoted earlier this week, the Medicare Advantage plan’s history suggests that bringing private insurers into the fold doesn’t do much of anything to control Medicare costs. So this line is accurate about the Romney-Ryan plan’s approach to Medicare funding, but the “strengthen” part is to be determined.
Nyro was born Laura Nigro in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Gilda Mirsky Nigro, a bookkeeper, and Louis Nigro, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter. Laura had a younger brother, Jan Nigro. Laura was of Russian Jewish and Italian ancestry.[4] As a child, she taught herself piano, read poetry, and listened to her mother’s records by Leontyne Price, Billie Holiday and classical composers such as Ravel and Debussy. She composed her first songs at age eight. With her family, she spent summers in the Catskill Mountains, where her father played the trumpet at resorts. She credited the Sunday school at the New York Society for Ethical Culture with providing the basis of her education; she also attended Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art.[5]
Nyro was very close to her aunt and uncle, the artists Theresa Bernstein and William Meyerowitz, who helped to support her education and early career.
While in high school, she sang with a group of friends in subway stations and on street corners. She said, “I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth.”[6] Among her favorite musicians were John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, Curtis Mayfield, Van Morrison, and girl groups such as The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas and the Shirelles. She also commented: “I was always interested in the social consciousness of certain songs. My mother and grandfather were progressive thinkers, so I felt at home in the peace movement and the women’s movement, and that has influenced my music.”[6]
Early career
Her father’s work brought him into contact with record company executive Artie Mogull (1927–2004),[7] who auditioned Laura in 1966 and became her first manager. However, Louis Nigro claims that he “not even once” mentioned Laura to any of his clients, adding “they would have laughed at me if I did.”[4] As a teenager she experimented with using different names, and Nyro (NEAR-oh) was the one she was using at the time. She sold her song “And When I Die” to Peter, Paul and Mary for $5,000, and made her first extended professional appearance, at age 18, singing at the “hungry i” coffeehouse in San Francisco. Mogull negotiated her a recording contract, and she recorded her debut album, More Than a New Discovery, for the Verve Folkways label. The album provided material for other artists, notably the 5th Dimension.
In 1967, Nyro made only her second major live appearance, at the Monterey Pop Festival. Although some accounts described her performance as a fiasco that culminated in her being booed off the stage,[8] recordings later made public contradict this view.[5]
Soon afterwards, David Geffen approached Mogull about taking over as her agent. Nyro successfully sued to void her management and recording contracts on the grounds that she had entered into them while still a minor. Geffen became her manager, and the two established a publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, under which the proceeds from her future compositions would be divided equally between them. Geffen also arranged Nyro’s new recording contract with Clive Davis at Columbia Records, and purchased the publishing rights to her early compositions. In his memoir Clive: Inside the Record Business, Davis recalled Nyro’s audition for him: she’d invited him to her New York apartment, turned off every light except that of a television set next to her piano, and played him the material that would become Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Around this time, Nyro considered becoming lead singer for Blood, Sweat & Tears, after the departure of founder Al Kooper, but was dissuaded by Geffen. However, BS&T would go on to have a hit with a cover of “And When I Die.”
The new contract allowed Nyro more artistic freedom and control. In 1968, Columbia released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, her second album. This received high critical praise for the depth and sophistication of the performance and arrangements, which merged pop structure with inspired imagery, rich vocals and avant-garde jazz, and is widely considered to be one of her best works. It was followed in 1969 by New York Tendaberry, another highly acclaimed work which cemented Nyro’s artistic credibility. The record’s “Time and Love” and “Save the Country” emerged as two of her most well-regarded and popular songs in the hands of other artists. Her own recordings sold mostly to a cult audience. This prompted Clive Davis, in his memoir, to note that her recordings, as solid as they were, came to resemble demonstrations for other performers.
By this time (1971) Nyro was married, to carpenter David Bianchini. She was also reportedly uncomfortable with attempts to market her as a celebrity and she announced her retirement from the music business at the age of 24.
In 1973, her Verve debut album was acquired and reissued by Columbia as The First Songs.
Later career
By 1976, her marriage had ended, and she returned with an album of new material, Smile. She then embarked on a four-month tour with a full band, which resulted in the 1977 live album Season of Lights.
After the 1978 album Nested, recorded when she was pregnant with her only child, she again took a break from recording, this time until 1984′s Mother’s Spiritual. She began touring with a band in 1988, her first concert appearances in 10 years. The tour was dedicated to the animal rights movement. The shows led to her 1989 release, Laura: Live at the Bottom Line, which included six new compositions.
Her final album of predominantly original material was Walk the Dog and Light the Light (1993), her last album for Columbia, which was co-produced by Gary Katz, best known for his work with Steely Dan. This sparked reappraisal of her place in popular music, and new commercial offers began to appear. She turned down lucrative film-composing offers, although she contributed a rare protest song to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Broken Rainbow“, about the unjust relocation of the Navajo people.
Nyro appeared at the 1989 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and performed in the 1980s and 1990s with female musicians. Among them was Nydia “Liberty” Mata, a popular drummer well known in the lesbian-feminist women’s music subculture. On October 27, 1997, a large-scale tribute concert was produced by women at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Performers included Sandra Bernhard, Toshi Reagon, and Phoebe Snow.
Both The Tonight Show and The Late Show with David Letterman staffs heavily pursued Nyro for a TV appearance during this period, yet she turned them down as well, citing her discomfort with appearing on television (she made only a handful of early TV appearances and one fleeting moment on VH-1 performing the title song from “Broken Rainbow” on Earth Day in 1990). She never released an official video, although there was talk of filming some Bottom Line appearances in the 1990s. On July 4, 1991, she opened for Bob Dylan at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts.[9]
Personal life
She had a relationship with singer/songwriter Jackson Browne in late 1970 to early 1971.
Nyro married Vietnam War veteran David Bianchini in 1972 after a whirlwind romance and spent the next three years living with him in a small town in Massachusetts. The marriage ended after three years, during which time she grew accustomed to the country life as opposed to the city life where she had recorded her first five records.
She had one son, Gil Bianchini, also known as musician Gil-T, from a short-lived relationship with an Indian man named Harindra Singh, but gave him the surname of her ex-husband.
In 1975, Nyro split from Bianchini and also suffered the trauma of the death of her mother Gilda to ovarian cancer at the age of 49; Laura herself died from the same disease at the same age two decades later. She consoled herself largely by recording a new album, enlisting Charlie Calello, with whom she had collaborated on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.
In the early 1980s, Laura began living with painter Maria Desiderio (1954–1999),[10] a relationship that lasted 17 years, the rest of Laura’s life.
Death
In 1996, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After the diagnosis, Columbia Records prepared a double-disc CD retrospective of material from her years at the label. The company involved Nyro herself, who selected the tracks and approved the final project. She lived to see the release of Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro (1997), and was reportedly pleased with the outcome.
Nyro died of ovarian cancer in Danbury, Connecticut, on April 8, 1997, at 49, the age at which the same disease had claimed the life of her mother.
Nyro’s influence on popular musicians has also been acknowledged by such artists as Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Elton John, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, and Melissa Manchester. Todd Rundgren stated that, once he heard her, he “stopped writing songs like The Who and started writing songs like Laura”.[11] Cyndi Lauper acknowledged that her rendition of song Walk on By, on her Grammy Award-nominated 2003 cover album At Last, was inspired by Nyro.[12] Elton John and Elvis Costello discussed Laura’s influence on both of them during the premiere episode of Costello’s interview show Spectacle on the Sundance channel. When asked by the host if he could name three great performer/songwriters who have largely been ignored, he cited Nyro as one of his choices. John also addressed Nyro’s influence on his 1970 song “Burn Down the Mission“, from Tumbleweed Connection, in particular. “I idolized her,” he concluded. “The soul, the passion, just the out and out audacity of the way her rhythmic and melody changes came was like nothing I’ve heard before.” [13]
A eurozone recession is certain, the UK is double-dipping and the US is growing at a snail’s pace – fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy year
—
The economic outlook for 2012: China’s growth model is flawed. Photograph: Reuters
The outlook for the global economy in 2012 is clear, but it isn’t pretty: recession in Europe, anaemic growth at best in the United States, and a sharp slowdown in China and in most emerging-market economies. Asian economies are exposed to China. Latin America is exposed to lower commodity prices (as both China and the advanced economies slow). Central and Eastern Europe are exposed to the eurozone. And turmoil in the Middle East is causing serious economic risks – both there and elsewhere – as geopolitical risk remains high and thus high oil prices will constrain global growth.
At this point, a eurozone recession is certain. While its depth and length cannot be predicted, a continued credit crunch, sovereign-debt problems, lack of competitiveness, and fiscal austerity imply a serious downturn.
The US – growing at a snail’s pace since 2010 – faces considerable downside risks from the eurozone crisis. It must also contend with significant fiscal drag, ongoing deleveraging in the household sector (amid weak job creation, stagnant incomes, and persistent downward pressure on real estate and financial wealth), rising inequality, and political gridlock.
Elsewhere among the major advanced economies, the United Kingdom is double dipping, as front-loaded fiscal consolidation and eurozone exposure undermine growth. In Japan, the post-earthquake recovery will fizzle out as weak governments fail to implement structural reforms.
Meanwhile, flaws in China’s growth model are becoming obvious. Falling property prices are starting a chain reaction that will have a negative effect on developers, investment, and government revenue. The construction boom is starting to stall, just as net exports have become a drag on growth, owing to weakening US and especially eurozone demand. Having sought to cool the property market by reining in runaway prices, Chinese leaders will be hard put to restart growth.
They are not alone. On the policy side, the US, Europe, and Japan, too, have been postponing the serious economic, fiscal, and financial reforms that are needed to restore sustainable and balanced growth.
Private- and public-sector deleveraging in the advanced economies has barely begun, with balance sheets of households, banks and financial institutions, and local and central governments still strained. Only the high-grade corporate sector has improved. But, with so many persistent tail risks and global uncertainties weighing on final demand, and with excess capacity remaining high, owing to past over-investment in real estate in many countries and China’s surge in manufacturing investment in recent years, these companies’ capital spending and hiring have remained muted.
Rising inequality – owing partly to job-slashing corporate restructuring – is reducing aggregate demand further, because households, poorer individuals, and labour-income earners have a higher marginal propensity to spend than corporations, richer households, and capital-income earners. Moreover, as inequality fuels popular protest around the world, social and political instability could pose an additional risk to economic performance.
At the same time, key current-account imbalances – between the US and China (and other emerging-market economies), and within the eurozone between the core and the periphery – remain large. Orderly adjustment requires lower domestic demand in over-spending countries with large current-account deficits and lower trade surpluses in over-saving countries via nominal and real currency appreciation. To maintain growth, over-spending countries need nominal and real depreciation to improve trade balances, while surplus countries need to boost domestic demand, especially consumption.
But this adjustment of relative prices via currency movements is stalled, because surplus countries are resisting exchange-rate appreciation in favour of imposing recessionary deflation on deficit countries. The ensuing currency battles are being fought on several fronts: foreign-exchange intervention, quantitative easing, and capital controls on inflows. And, with global growth weakening further in 2012, those battles could escalate into trade wars.
Finally, policymakers are running out of options. Currency devaluation is a zero-sum game, because not all countries can depreciate and improve net exports at the same time. Monetary policy will be eased as inflation becomes a non-issue in advanced economies (and a lesser issue in emerging markets). But monetary policy is increasingly ineffective in advanced economies, where the problems stem from insolvency – and thus creditworthiness – rather than liquidity.Meanwhile, fiscal policy is constrained by the rise of deficits and debts, bond vigilantes, and new fiscal rules in Europe. Backstopping and bailing out financial institutions is politically unpopular, while near-insolvent governments don’t have the money to do so. And, politically, the promise of the G-20 has given way to the reality of the G-0: weak governments find it increasingly difficult to implement international policy coordination, as the world views, goals, and interests of advanced economies and emerging markets come into conflict.
As a result, dealing with stock imbalances – the large debts of households, financial institutions, and governments – by papering over solvency problems with financing and liquidity may eventually give way to painful and possibly disorderly restructurings. Likewise, addressing weak competitiveness and current-account imbalances requires currency adjustments that may eventually lead some members to exit the eurozone.
Restoring robust growth is difficult enough without the ever-present spectre of deleveraging and a severe shortage of policy ammunition. But that is the challenge that a fragile and unbalanced global economy faces in 2012. To paraphrase Bette Davis in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy year!”
When she dances in the space
My body loses its fatigue
My lip shakes a smile
When she swaps the move
My chest loses the beat
My eyes know where to go
Went out, went out of time
Fell down, my samba fell down
When she shays that she doesn’t say
When she pretends that she’s mine
When I let myself go*
When she wants one more swig
When she swaps my cup
I let life go by
Went out, went out of time
Fell down, my samba fell down
I respect the decision
She knows what she wants
I want no discussion
She knows what she wants
From me
From me
From me…
She knows what she wants
When she goes up, I’m saved
Goes down from the asphalt wall
I let a samba in the air
Wraps me in the daybreak
Humming Cartola**
At the table of another bar
Went out, went out of time
Fell down, my samba fell down
I respect the decision
She knows what she wants
I want no discussion
She knows what she wants
From me
From me
From me…
She knows what she wants
With the narrative of the 2012 presidential race pretty much set in stone — both President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney will ceaselessly hammer each other on the economy, and little else — the biggest question of the summer has been who Romney is going to pick for his running mate. It’s a seriously important question; aside from the fact that a candidate for vice president need be worthy of that title, picking a VP like, say, Marco Rubio could help Romney expand his potential voter base.
So, considering how worked up political pundits are about Romney’s looming pick, you’d expect he’d announce it with some modicum of gravitas, right? Well, hot on the heels of the ‘revelation’ that smartphone voters are a very important bloc, Romney’s decided to announce the biggest potential game changer this race via a smartphone app.
Apparently, the app (called Mitt’s VP) guarantees that users will receive notification of the pick before the press thanks by shoving push notification down your throat. It also hooks you up with a “Follow Romney on Twitter” button and a link to donate to Romney’s campaign. Sounds rather bland, and certainly doesn’t have the pomp that you’d expect considering the importance of the announcement. But considering Romney’s past forays into campaign apps, I don’t fault him for keeping things simple. And hey, if the White House thing doesn’t work out, maybe Mitt’s marketing skills could mint another exciting tech IPO
At the same time, key current-account imbalances – between the US and China (and other emerging-market economies), and within the eurozone between the core and the periphery – remain large. Orderly adjustment requires lower domestic demand in over-spending countries with large 
