Reflection of the Holiday Season

Now that Christmas has come and gone, I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable holidays I've celebrated in a long time. Between the family visits, which truly were more like reunions, since I don't have the opportunity to see many of my family members all that often, and all the heavenly food, and good cheer, I feel so blessed and loved. That is the magic of Christmas! I am interested in hearing what each of my readers loved about the holiday. . . whether a memorable moment, being reunited with a long lost family member or friend, a favorite gift, or the simple joy in a child's face when opening gifts.... please share . . . these are the things that make life beautiful!!!

Now 2013 is soon upon us . . . wishing everyone a Happy, Healthy, and a Peaceful New Year!! All the best to each and every one of you!!!

Homemade Eggnog! Forget the Carton!

Considering most of us only enjoy eggnog once a year during Christmas, I wanted to make it homemade and begone with the store bought carton. I am about to make my third batch this year already and I must say people really taste the difference. It is sooooo much better... give it a try . . . the recipe I use is found below!

Happy Holidays!

How to Make Fabulous Eggnog

First, here are the tricks of the trade that will make your homemade eggnog the best ever.

• chill everything, including the bowls and utensils like whisks and spoons and keep your egg yolk, sugar and alcohol mixture in the refrigerator for at least five hours to let the flavors meld before completing your eggnog. Make sure it doesn't get too warmed up sitting in the punchbowl too-- either serve it cup by cup from pitchers replenished from your fridge or make sure your punchbowl is in a cool place.
  
• Use really fresh ingredients. Organic eggs from free range chickens really do taste better and I recommend organic milk and cream too.
• Use light not dark rum and decent brands of bourbon and cognac-- no rotgut for Christmas punch OK?
• Warning-- this is an adults only recipe. It contains lots of alcohol and packs quite a wallop. Give the kiddies fruit punch-- better for them anyway::-)

And now here is the recipe. It is an easy, modern adaptation that should give you a perfect eggnog.

You will need:

• 12 large eggs, separated
• 1 1/2 cups superfine sugar
• 1 quart whole milk
• 1 1/2 quarts heavy cream
• 3 cups bourbon
• 1/2 cup light rum
• 1/2 cup cognac
  
• Freshly grated nutmeg to taste

Directions

• Separate the eggs-- set the whites aside in a large metal bowl.

• In a large mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks with a wire whisk until thick and pale yellow. Gradually add sugar to yolks while continuing to whisk.
• Now, beat in the milk and 1 quart of cream.
• Add bourbon, rum, and cognac, stirring constantly. Put the bowl in the refrigerator to chill and to give the booze a chance to meld with the eggs and milk( at least five hours)
• Just before serving, beat egg whites until stiff. Fold into mixture.
• Whip remaining heavy cream until stiff and fold in. Sprinkle with nutmeg and serve from chilled pitchers or in a beautiful punch bowl. This recipe should serve about two dozen people.

NOTE: It is important that you let the egg yolk ,sugar, and alcohol mixture marinate in the fridge for at least 5 hours. The alcohol kills any harmful bacteria in the raw eggs. As an alternative to this, or to make a non alcoholic version of eggnog, follow the recipe in the video below which shows you how to cook the egg yolk mixture to a custard-like consistency. It is not quite as historically authentic, nor do I like the taste quite as well, but if you are worried about salmonella or prefer an alcohol free eggnog, this is the way to go...

Am I Safe? Talking to Your Kids About the Sandy Hook School Shooting

I know every parent has had to face the reality that it is no longer possible to shield our youngsters from horrific tragedy... now it is even more important to engage our children in conversation and to provide to them comfort and help in understanding what happened so they can begin the healing process too.

Across America, parents are taking a big breath before attempting one of the more difficult conversations they will have with their children: explaining how tragedies such as the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School can happen.

It’s hard to distill the Connecticut tragedy for little kids when it doesn’t even make sense to adults. But at dinnertime, bedtime, during carpool and everywhere in between, children will be turning to mom and dad for reassurance that they are safe.

“Tell them the truth, in their language,” says Emanuel Maidenberg, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA who specializes in anxiety. “Let them know that this is something that doesn’t happen very often and they are safe.”

Experts vary on how proactive parents should be: some recommend against bringing up the subject unless curious or frightened children ask, although most advise parents to initiate a conversation. Either way, the key is to reassure kids and answer their questions without providing information overload. Be honest, keeping in mind your child’s age, adjusting your explanations to your children’s ability to understand. And continue with your family’s regular routine, advises Maidenberg. “Most young kids don’t have the skills to put their feelings into words so encourage them to talk about what they feel and name their emotions,” says Maidenberg.

It’s normal for kids who hear about what happened to feel stressed and anxious, says Kenneth Dodge, director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, especially since the shootings occurred at school. But despite the intense coverage that school shootings receive, schools are, in fact, some of the safest places for young children. The most recent statistics from 2010 show that 17 children were killed in U.S. schools — less than 2% of child homicides that year, according to David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. The figures are reassuring, to some extent, but the drama of a mass calamity is impossible to ignore.

“You can say to your kids, Just because this happened at one school doesn’t mean it’s going to happen at your school. I’m really comfortable and confident about your school,” says Dodge. “It’s natural to feel anxious, but most kids will get over it on their own.”

Parents can help by curbing any tendency to overshare; save the in-depth discussions for grown-up company. “You don’t want to tell kids too much,” says Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx. Any amount of exposure to scary news about the school shooting can potentially lead to clingy behavior, irritability or loss of appetite. Children also express feelings through play so it wouldn’t be unusual for them to use art or Legos to capture their thoughts. Briggs was a graduate student at New York University on 9/11; in the weeks after the attacks, she visited various schools where she watched children as they sketched images of buildings falling or airplanes on fire. “They would draw picture after picture,” she says.

That’s a healthy way of coping with disaster. Most children will ask some questions about what happened in Connecticut, draw some pictures, inquire about what it means to be dead — and move on. For those who seem fixated on the details and worried about their safety even after several weeks go by, it’s a good idea to seek advice from a pediatrician or psychologist.

It’s also a good idea to empower kids who feel helpless by brainstorming ways to be useful. Have your kids write letters to the students at Sandy Hook (912 Dickinson Dr., Sandy Hook, CT 06482), suggests Dodge. Make signs of support. It will help up shore up morale in Newtown, Conn., and make your kids feel useful, which in turn relieves some of the stress and fear they are feeling.

Kids, of course, aren’t the only ones who need help coping. As a parent of a kindergartener, I dropped by her school after news of the Sandy Hook shooting to give her a kiss and a hug for reasons she did not yet know. While at her school, her teacher — who teared up but quickly regained her composure — handed me a note from the school district’s superintendent reiterating exactly what various experts had emphasized. He encouraged parents to turn off the television news and give “honest, simple, brief” answers to any questions that kids ask. “If children keep asking the same question over and over again it is because they are trying to understand, trying to make sense out of the disruption and confusion in their world,” the superintendent wrote.

As parents, we can only try to help that process along, even if we don’t have the answers.

Egypt’s Constitutional Endgame: Where Confusion Is the Rule

All the chaos going on in the middle east is frightening. . . what does this mean for us, the United States?

Egypt‘s constitutional endgame is upon us. And almost nobody in the country–including the document’s drafters–seems to be truly prepared.

On Nov. 22, when President Mohamed Morsi issued his stunning decree granting himself sweeping powers, one of the least publicized aspects of the declaration gave the country’s Constituent Assembly an extra two months to finish drafting the new constitution–extending the deadline into early 2013.

One week later, Morsi abruptly and mysteriously shifted tactics. Suddenly the constitution was ready for approval and a national referendum on the document is now scheduled for Dec. 15.

What followed was something approaching a live televised political farce. In a marathon Nov. 30 session lasting more than 16 hours and ending after 6 am Cairo time, the assembly’s overwhelmingly male and Islamist members sped through and approved each of the 230 articles as if they were desperately trying to meet a looming deadline.

The final document not only doesn’t represent any sort of national consensus; it doesn’t even seem to have benefited from proper proofreading.  There were words missing and grammatical mistakes. Language suddenly appeared that hadn’t been present in any of the multiple proposed drafts. At one point, one of Morsi’s own legal advisors Fouad Gadallah stood up to object to an apparent mistake in the text and was shouted down by the assembly’s head.

“They weren’t ready,” says Heba Morayef, head of the Human Rights Watch Egypt office, who estimated she watched 13 hours of the session. “They knew this document wasn’t ready and should not have gone forward.”

The approved text contains a number of aspects that alarm critics. The issue of equality for women is qualified by the stipulation that women must balance that with their duties to the home. Laws dealing with women’s rights must not contradict shari’a–Islamic jurisprudence. And Al Azhar, the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam, now plays a vaguely defined role in vetting any laws that might touch on shari’a– raising the prospect of unelected religious authorities holding sway over democratically elected lawmakers.

On the plus side, there are new and solid protections against arbitrary detention and torture by the police. But a clause outlawing military trials for civilians was mysteriously watered down at the last minute and approved with minimal debate.

The effect of the apparent shotgun approval on Egypt’s already chaotic and unstable political scene has been dramatic. Even before the sudden constitutional stratagem, Tahrir Square had been filled for days with angry demonstrators protesting Morsi’s perceived dictatorial power grab. Egypt’s judges had already been up in arms over the decree–which robbed them of any oversight over the president’s decisions or the status of the constituent assembly.

The already intense street action has been driven up a level, with many protesters openly labeling the controversy the start of the second Egyptian revolution.  Several independent newspapers and satellite television channels went on strike Tuesday, ceasing publication or broadcasting blank screens. As of Tuesday evening in Cairo, several large protest marches from around the city were converging on the presidential palace–at one point fighting through barrages of tear gas fired by police.

Meanwhile the judges seem to be struggling to come to terms with Morsi’s power play. Several judicial districts have gone on strike and the Judges Club–an unofficial body–has sworn that its members will not act as monitors for the upcoming constitutional referendum. However the Supreme Judicial Council has publicly pledged that it would order judges and prosecutors to serve as electoral supervisors–raising the prospect of open fissures within the judiciary and possible disciplinary action for those judges who refuse to supervise the voting. A Dec. 2 session of the Supreme Constitutional Court was effectively sabotaged by crowds of Morsi supporters who surrounded the courthouse and prevented many of the judges from entering the building.

In a way, the constitution-drafting process has gone much the same way as the preceding 23 months since Hosni Mubarak was ousted by power in February 2011: lots of confusion, mixed signals and divisiveness–followed by rapid deadlines that leave no room for debate or consensus building.

That tone was first set back in March 2011 when the Muslim Brotherhood mobilized its cadres to approve a national referendum that set the country toward fast-track parliamentary elections before a constitution could be written. The tactic was immediately decried as a cynical Brotherhood ploy designed to give the Islamist group and its decades-old grassroots machine an electoral advantage over the newer post-revolutionary political forces.

That parliamentary election, one year ago, produced an overwhelming Islamist majority. The Parliament was dissolved in the summer of 2012 on a technicality by the Supreme Constitutional Court–sparking the current war between the Muslim Brotherhood and the judiciary. But the damage had been done, since the Parliament had already selected the members of the constituent assembly–stacking the body with Islamists.

By fast-tracking the constitution, Morsi and his supporters seem to be essentially giving up on the entire idea of national consensus. The constituent assembly had been plagued from the start by mass withdrawals from secularist and Christian members–saying their minority viewpoints were being ignored. Now a decision appears to have been made by the Brotherhood and their Salafist allies to simply forge ahead regardless.

The Islamists had the numbers within the constituent assembly to approve basically anything they wanted. And once the referendum comes, they feel they will be able to marshal more than enough votes to get the document approved. “There’s a sort of confident arrogance that comes with the certainty that they know they can mobilize voters,” said Morayef, of Human Rights Watch.

They might be right. Even Morsi’s most implacable opponents are pessimistic that they’ll be able to defeat this constitution in a national referendum. Morsi’s supporters are already persuasively framing the vote as a question of “chaos vs stability” since a defeat would set the country back to square one and prolong Egypt’s time without a constitution or a parliament.

Amr Darrag, a senior official with the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and secretary general of the constituent assembly, says Morsi has proven he is in a hurry to finish the constitution and elect a new parliament–at which point he will go back to being a normally powered president. “You can’t call a man a dictator when he is trying to give up power,” Darrag says.

With voting for expatriate Egyptians looming on Dec. 8 and the national referendum one week later, the country seems to be careening towards for a chaotic and divisive confrontation. One indication of the fast-rising stakes: Mohammed El Baradei–the longtime reform advocate who generally avoids street politics–has uncharacteristically taken to leading multiple protest marches. In a Dec. 3 editorial in the Financial Times, El Baradei described Egypt’s short-term future in nearly apocalyptic terms. “After 23 months of struggling to bring democracy to Egypt, is this the best we can do? A president claiming dictatorial powers. A parliament packed with Islamists. And a draft constitution, hastily cobbled together without basic protections for women,Christians and all Egyptians,” El Baradei wrote. “And thus we are back in Tahrir Square. The situation is volatile: an Egypt bitterly divided between Islamists and the rest of the country, opening the door for scenarios such as army intervention, a revolt of the poor, or even civil war.”

Venice's Hungry Tide

Earlier this month the tourist mecca of Venice experienced a dramatic bout of acqua alta — or high water — flooding, brought on by heavy rains that led to much of the coastal, historical city of bridges and canals getting swamped. This is just so horrible . . . one of my favorite cities. Between Hurricane Sandy and now this, I am just so concerned about the changes in our earth's weather patterns. What will come next?!

 

One concerned blogger!!!!

Test Your DNA For Diseases — No Doctor Required

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, in Mountain View, Calif., is planning to make whole genome sequencing available directly to the public.

When Anne Wojcicki’s son was a baby, she ran a swab across the inside of his cheek, collecting DNA to send to a lab. Last year when she was pregnant with her daughter, she tested her amniotic cells. The goal in each case: to get a glimpse of her children’s genes—including whether they contain certain kinks that increase the risk of developing everything from gallstones to multiple sclerosis. “As a parent,” says Wojcicki, “the most responsible thing I can do is get as much information about my children as possible so I can then think through how I can make them as healthy as possible.”

Wojcicki isn’t just any random parent, though. She’s a Yale-educated biologist and the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that sells DNA analysis directly to consumers—no doctor required. “Your information is your information,” says Wojcicki, who is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “If you want it, you should be able to have it.”

Genetic tests have been around for years, but in 2003 scientists took the field a step further, announcing the first complete mapping of a human genome—an entire genetic code. Sequencing, or “reading,” a person’s genome is one of the newest, most controversial tools in the medical arsenal because of the motherlode of information it contains about future disease risk. Genetic markers for heart disease or cancer may spur consumers on to healthier behavior. But when it comes to conditions such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s–which can’t be prevented—many experts are divided on whether knowing is helpful or harmful.

Yet even as physicians and bioethicists wrestle with the implications of revealing dark DNA secrets, entrepreneurs like Wojcicki are planning to make whole genome sequencing (WGS) available directly to the public. Other companies, like San Diego-based Illumina, are already offering the test to what CEO Jay Flatley calls a “healthy and proactive” demographic.

So far, these tests have been aimed mainly at early adopters: tech-savvy folks who buy the latest smartphones and are comfortable with life on the cutting edge. But as prices keep falling, the audience is likely to expand. Can the average mom or dad handle knowing all about the risks lurking in their kids’ DNA?

“Everyone at this point is flying by the seat of their pants,” says Jim Evans, a medical geneticist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is editor-in-chief of Genetics in Medicine. “The technology is outpacing us.”

Parents, of course, are often uniquely receptive to the latest promises of medical science. Firms offering private cord-blood banking bombard expectant moms and dads with what-if scenarios that can tempt all but the most hard-bitten parents-to-be to spend thousands of dollars storing frozen cord blood that will most likely never be used.

Adding to the confusion: it isn’t easy to interpret sequencing results. Much of our genome remains a mystery, and sifting through the sheer quantity of information generated by sequencing can be overwhelming. Even medical professionals, after years of training, are often unsure what to make of the pages and pages of data that genomic sequencing spits out. Dr. David Margulies, who oversees a Children’s Hospital Boston initiative to make genetic and genomic insights more accessible, says better interpretation is “the last major barrier to widespread clinical use of DNA sequencing.”

In Cambridge, Mass., Knome is working on erasing that barrier. For $2,000 per person, Knome does the data-crunching needed to interpret a sequence—figuring out what all those billions of nucleotides, or DNA “letters,” mean. When the company launched five years ago, its clients were mostly universities and pharmaceutical companies. Now it’s going mainstream. “There has been a big shift this year,” says Knome CEO Martin Tolar. “We have been swamped with requests from clinics.”

Knome’s software separates the data into tiers of relevance. “There will be a report about different levels of importance that says, These variants are actionable, meaning you know what they are and can do something about them, these variants don’t seem relevant, and these are novel variants we haven’t seen before and don’t yet understand,” says Tolar.

Yet even though some companies are making complex genetic data more digestible, direct-to-consumer tests like the ones 23andMe offers have been criticized for their methodology, which some critics regard as “genetics lite.” To weigh in on a person’s predisposition for conditions including celiac disease and melanoma, 23andMe only looks at a small fraction of points along someone’s genome. The company is currently seeking FDA approval for this approach. In the past year, some other direct-to-consumer DNA companies have closed up shop before undergoing this kind of regulatory scrutiny.

Eventually, 23andMe intends to start offering WGS, which dives much deeper by analyzing all 3 billion base pairs, or sets of “letters,” that make up a person’s DNA alphabet. But unlike the dozen or so academic labs and private companies that are already sequencing genomes or exomes—the subset of genes that codes for proteins, which regulate the body’s tissues and organs—23andMe would not require a physician’s approval for this process. That means that one day, accessing a sophisticated sequencing test could be as easy as buying a pregnancy test at a drugstore.

Many in the industry remain skeptical about cutting out the clinician. GeneDx, a Maryland-based genetic testing company, charges $5,000 to sequence an individual’s exome. But the company will only run its tests at a doctor’s request. “If you leave out the physician, there could be significant misunderstandings,” says Amar Kamath, vice president of marketing.

Parents, for example, may not know that genes are far from the last word in determining disease risk; environment plays a significant role too. And they may be unprepared to respond to the news that their children are predisposed to develop serious diseases as adults. It can be an emotional blow—and a life-long burden—if a mom learns that her baby girl carries a mutation that increases her risk of breast cancer or a dad finds out that his aspiring linebacker is genetically predisposed to developing Alzheimer’s. That’s why Illumina’s Flatley personally vets every clinical case and refuses to sequence kids who aren’t sick. “We don’t do this just for fun,” he says. “We do it on children when we’re trying to save their lives. We don’t believe parents have a legal or ethical right to do this.”

Wojcicki doesn’t share that viewpoint, personally or professionally. Since 23andMe launched in 2006, more than 180,000 people have been tested as the price has fallen from $999 for information on 14 traits and health risks to $299 for more than 200. About 3% have been children, and Wojcicki thinks demand for testing kids is on the rise. “I do believe at some point in time everyone will be genotyped at birth,” she says.

Nor does she disagree about the value of having a doctor weigh in; she says she had the data from her unborn daughter’s testing sent to her pediatrician. “I did actually find it helpful to walk through that with her,” says Wojcicki. But she does take issue with the need for a physician to sanction the tests in the first place.

Though Wojcicki won’t discuss her kids’ results, she recently mused on her company’s blog about her motivation for testing her children. She’s particularly interested in Parkinson’s disease because her husband has a genetic mutation that heightens the risk by up to 80%. Brin’s mother has the disease; his kids stand a 50% chance of inheriting it.

Wojcicki, who is 39, notes that some genetic findings could be used to influence parents’ everyday decisions—down to which sports their kids play. For instance, there’s a gene mutation called APOE-4 that indicates a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. In people who test positive for APOE-4, research has associated traumatic brain injuries with a greater likelihood of brain disease.

In other words, if you know your kid has the APOE-4 gene mutation, you just might knock PeeWee Football or ice hockey—Wojcicki played on the varsity team at Yale—off the list of extracurriculars. At the least, you’d probably give extra consideration to insisting that your child wear a helmet on the soccer field.

For Wojcicki, this emphasis on genetic testing has nothing to do with overprotective parenting and everything to do with preventive medicine. “The way I can potentially start to prevent certain illnesses is to know what they’re at higher risk for,” Wojcicki recently told TIME. Her grandmother had macular degeneration; when testing revealed that some of Wojcicki’s nieces and nephews are at higher risk, she responded by buying them high-quality sunglasses. If her own kids were predisposed to developing diabetes, she’d encourage healthier eating. “I want to do everything I can to potentially enable my children to be disease-free,” she says.

Social Security Benefits to Go Up by 1.7 Percent

I am happy about the increase in Social Security but let's be honest here... it is one of the smallest increases since 1975. It is barely keeping up with inflation. Uggghhhhh....

 More than 56 million Social Security recipients will see their monthly payments go up by 1.7 percent next year.

The increase, which starts in January, is tied to a measure of inflation released Tuesday. It shows that inflation has been relatively low over the past year, resulting in one of the smallest increases in Social Security payments since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975.

This year, Social Security recipients received a 3.6 percent increase in benefits after getting none the previous two years.

About 8 million people who receive Supplemental Security Income will also receive the cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, meaning the announcement will affect about 1 in 5 U.S. residents.

Social Security payments for retired workers average $1,237 a month, or about $14,800 a year. A 1.7 percent increase will amount to about $21 a month, or $252 a year, on average.

Social Security also provides benefits to millions of disabled workers, spouses, widows, widowers and children.

The amount of wages subjected to Social Security taxes is going up, too. Social Security is supported by a 12.4 percent tax on wages up to $110,100. That threshold will increase to $113,700 next year, resulting in higher taxes for nearly 10 million workers and their employers, according to the Social Security Administration.

Half the tax is paid by workers and the other half is paid by employers. Congress and President Barack Obama reduced the share paid by workers from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent for 2011 and 2012. The temporary cut, however, is due to expire at the end of the year.

Some of next year’s COLA could be wiped out by higher Medicare premiums, which are deducted from Social Security payments. The Medicare Part B premium, which covers doctor visits, is expected to rise by about $7 per month for 2013, according to government projections.

The premium is currently $99.90 a month for most seniors. Medicare is expected to announce the premium for 2013 in the coming weeks.

“If seniors are getting a low COLA, much of their increase will go to pay off their Medicare Part B premium,” said Mary Johnson, a policy analyst at The Senior Citizens League.

By law, the increase in benefits is based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W, a broad measure of consumer prices generated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It measures price changes for food, housing, clothing, transportation, energy, medical care, recreation and education.

The Social Security Administration compares the price index in the third quarter of each year — the months of July, August and September — with the same three months in the previous year.

If consumer prices increase from year to year, Social Security recipients automatically get higher payments, starting the following January. If prices drop, the payments stay the same, as they did in 2010 and 2011.

Since 1975, the annual COLA has averaged 4.2 percent. Only five times has it been below 2 percent, including the two times it was zero. Before 1975, it took an act of Congress to increase Social Security payments.

The COLA has played an important role in keeping older Americans out of poverty, said David Certner, AARP’s legislative policy director. Most older Americans rely on Social Security for a majority of their incomes, according to the Social Security Administration.

Over the past decade, the COLA has helped increase incomes for seniors, even as incomes have dropped for younger workers.

From 2001 to 2011, the median income for all U.S. households fell by 6.6 percent, when inflation was taken into account, according to census data. But the median income for households headed by someone 65 or older rose by 13 percent.

Romney Fights for Ohio, Regardless of the Polls

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio Sept. 25, 2012.

Romney needs to win Ohio! I have faith but saying a lot of prayers!

Before Mitt Romney set foot in Ohio for a two-day bus tour this week, his campaign was spinning the state of the presidential contest there. On a flight between Newark and Dayton on Tuesday, Romney political director Rich Beeson argued that publicly available polling, most notably a Washington Post survey that showed President Obama ahead by 8 points in the state, had the race all wrong. “The public polls are what the public polls are,” he said. “I kind of hope the Obama campaign is basing their campaign on what the public polls say. We don’t. We have confidence in our data.”

Beeson didn’t share any of the campaign’s internal polling–nor did he explicitly say that it shows a radically different race than the public surveys. But like many Republicans at the moment, he was adamant that polling samples based on exit polls from the 2008 election overstate Democratic support. (Some are taking that theory to extremes.) Romney is “inside the margin of error in Ohio,” Beeson said, a statement that suggested a close race without really putting a number on it. True, the Post poll could easily be an outlier, and a New York Times/CBS News poll released Wednesday is almost certainly one: it found Obama up by 10 points in Ohio, a margin larger than any other major firm has reported. But even if the number strains credulity, it’s bad news for Romney.

Both candidates will sweep through Ohio on Wednesday, the unofficial start of the final mad scrum for swing-state votes. Romney rallied with Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Rob Portman on Tuesday in Dayton, and he’ll hit three more cities Wednesday, while Obama visits Bowling Green State and Kent State universities. Those efforts make sense regardless of the latest polls.

Beeson claimed the map is “wide open,” that Romney does not need to win Ohio to carry the election. While it’s true that there are scenarios in which Romney would not need Ohio to win, losing it would seriously handicap his chances. If you add Ohio to the category of states that Obama is almost certain to win, that group adds up to 255 electoral college votes, just 15 shy of the total needed to carry the race. In other words, Romney can’t afford to withdraw from Ohio. Taken in this light, Beeson’s comments can be interpreted a little differently. He said repeatedly that the Romney campaign is “basing our decisions off” trusted internal data, not darkening public polls. If this week is any indication, that decision is to fight for Ohio, no matter what the numbers say

13 Reasons Tea Is Good for You

I am so glad I prefer tea over coffee simply for the many health benefits! I'm going to go get my tea on . . . all of you should to! 

Put down those saucer cups and get chugging — tea is officially awesome for your health. But before loading up on Red Zinger, make sure that your “tea” is actually tea. Real tea is derived from a particular plant (Camellia sinensis) and includes only four varieties: green, black, white, and oolong. Anything else (like herbal “tea”) is an infusion of a different plant and isn’t technically tea.

But what real tea lacks in variety, it makes up for with some serious health benefits. Researchers attribute tea’s health properties to polyphenols (a type of antioxidant) and phytochemicals. Though most studies have focused on the better-known green and black teas, white and oolong also bring benefits to the table. Read on to find out why coffee’s little cousin rocks your health.

1. Tea can boost exercise endurance. Scientists have found that the catechins (antioxidants) in green tea extract increase the body’s ability to burn fat as fuel, which accounts for improved muscle endurance.
2. Drinking tea could help reduce the risk of heart attack. Tea might also help protect against cardiovascular and degenerative diseases.
3. The antioxidants in tea might help protect against a boatload of cancers, including breast, colon, colorectal, skin, lung, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas, liver, ovarian, prostate and oral cancers. But don’t rely solely on tea to keep a healthy body — tea is not a miracle cure, after all. While more studies than not suggest that tea has cancer-fighting benefits, the current research is mixed.
4. Tea helps fight free radicals. Tea is high in oxygen radical absorbance capacity (“ORAC” to its friends), which is a fancy way of saying that it helps destroy free radicals (which can damage DNA) in the body. While our bodies are designed to fight free radicals on their own, they’re not 100 percent effective — and since damage from these radical oxygen ninjas has been linked to cancer, heart disease and neurological degeneration, we’ll take all the help we can get.
5. Tea is hydrating to the body (even despite the caffeine!).
6. Drinking tea is linked with a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease. When considered with other factors like smoking, physical activity, age and body mass index, regular tea drinking was associated with a lowered risk of Parkinson’s disease in both men and women.
7. Tea might provide protection from ultraviolet rays. We know it’s important to limit exposure to UV rays, and we all know what it’s like to feel the burn. The good news is that green tea may act as a back-up sunscreen.
8. Tea could keep waist circumference in check. In one study, participants who regularly consumed hot tea had lower waist circumference and lower BMI than non-consuming participants. Scientists speculate that regular tea drinking lowers the risk of metabolic syndrome (which increases the risk of diabetes, artery disease and stroke), although it’s important to remember that correlation does not equal causation.
9. Regular tea drinking might also counteract some of the negative effects of smoking and might even lessen the risk of lung cancer (good news, obviously, but not a justification for cigs).
10. Tea could be beneficial to people with Type 2 diabetes. Studies suggest that compounds in green tea could help diabetics better process sugars.
11. Tea can help the body recover from radiation. One study found that tea helped protect against cellular degeneration upon exposure to radiation, while another found that tea can help skin bounce back postexposure.
12. Green tea has been found to improve bone mineral density and strength.
13. Tea might be an effective agent in the prevention and treatment of neurological diseases, especially degenerative diseases (think Alzheimer’s). While many factors influence brain health, polyphenols in green tea may help maintain the parts of the brain that regulate learning and memory.

Though most research on tea is highly positive, it’s not all definitive — so keep these caveats in mind before stocking up on gallons of the stuff:

1. Keep it cool. Repeatedly drinking hot beverages may boost the risk of esophageal cancer. Give tea several minutes to cool off before sipping.
2. The studies seem convincing, but a rat does not a human make. Chemicals in tea may react differently in the lab than they do in the human body. Tannins (and the other good stuff in green tea) may not be bioavailable for humans, meaning tea might not always benefit human health to the same degree as in lab studies suggest.
3. All tea drinks are not created equal. The body’s access to the good stuff in tea might be determined by the tea variety, canning and processing, and the way it was brewed.

The takeaway: at the very least, tea should be safe to consume — just not in excessive amounts. So brew up a batch of the good stuff — hot or cold — and enjoy.

As Egypt’s Islamists Cement Their Rule, Can Secularists Reclaim the Revolution?

Anti-Morsy protesters hold a large Egyptian flag and chant slogans in front of the presidential palace during a demonstration in Cairo, Aug. 24, 2012. 

 

It has not been a very good 18 months for Egypt’s secular revolutionary political forces. After standing at the forefront of an unprecedented and triumphant popular uprising last year, which led to the ousting of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, their star rapidly dimmed. In the wake of the revolution, Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the even-more-conservative Salafists used their existing grassroots networks to dominate parliamentary elections last winter while post-revolutionary secular parties struggled to catch up. Presidential elections earlier this summer were an even bigger disaster: the  non-Brotherhood pro-revolution camp divisively split itself between multiple candidates, producing a thoroughly Mubarak-era runoff choice between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsy and Mubarak’s former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq representing the military-backed deep state.

“What happened in the presidential election was a wakeup call to a lot of the players,” says Hussein Gohar, head of foreign affairs for the Social Democrat Party, one of the main post-revolutionary secularist parties.  “People panicked after Morsy became president and they’re still panicking.”

The Morsy-Shafiq choice left most of the secular revolutionaries out in the cold and thoroughly depressed. For the past several months, they have watched from the sidelines as Morsy and the Brotherhood faced off against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or SCAF—impotently hoping for a scenario where both sides lost.

Now Egypt faces a new crossroads. Morsy is firmly entrenched in the presidential palace; his power struggle with the military ended rather abruptly last month when he succeeded in outmaneuvering the SCAF—sending Mubarak-era Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi and his loyalists into early retirement. Most importantly, there’s a new parliamentary election looming after the previous parliament was dissolved via court order on a technicality. The exact timing of the new elections is uncertain; it’s tied to the ratification of a new constitution, which is still being drafted. Gohar said he expects the elections to come “any time between December and March.”

All of which begs the question: does Egypt’s secular opposition have enough time to make an impact this time around and can they learn from their tactical and organizational mistakes of the previous 18 months?

The looming deadline has touched off a flurry of political activity. The local press is now filled with daily updates on coalition negotiations between a host of post-revolutionary secular parties such as the Social Democrats and the Free Egyptian Party. This week a new political player emerged in the form of former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammed ElBaradei, who officially launched his own Constitution Party.
 
“They’re just starting to realize that [elections] are fast approaching,” said secularist writer and analyst Bassem Sabry. “Everyone wants to get into some alliance or another. It’s a question of how and who approaches who and who’s in charge.”

Veteran socialist politician Hamdin Sabbahi–who finished a surprisingly strong third place in the presidential vote—is being courted by multiple parties to join forces. And longtime Egyptian diplomat Amr Moussa, despite a weak fifth place presidential showing, “remains a towering figure” on the secular scene and is being similarly courted, according to Sabry.

Fourth place finisher Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood official who fashioned himself as a progressive  Islamist and an alternative to the Brotherhood, has so far remained distant from the more secular negotiations and is expected to form his own electoral bloc along with other centrist Islamist forces.

“The future of the Egyptian left is not as bleak as people think,” said Wael Nawara, a longtime progressive activist and a member of the Constitution Party. But Nawara acknowledges that whatever secular coalition emerges for the new parliamentary elections will still face an uphill battle to crack the combined Brotherhood-Salafist bloc that captured nearly 75 percent of the People’s Assembly, the lower house of Parliament.

“Financing, for starters, will be an issue. This is an area where the Muslim Brothers already have an advantage,” Nawara said. In addition to their own homegrown financing from disciplined loyalists, the Islamists are widely presumed to be benefiting from a river of overseas funding from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

“These other parties will just have to rely on local donations—which is just not something people are used to here. They’re at a disadvantage,” Nawara said. There’s also a steep learning curve to be overcome on how to build the kind of grassroots mobilization machine that the Brotherhood spent decades crafting. To help speed that process, Gohar, the Social Democrat official, has turned to his European counterparts for help. A delegation from the Danish Social Democrat Party arrives in mid-September to conduct what Gohar calls “Democracy 101” training sessions, and the British Labor Party is planning to conduct similar training here.

There is, of course, a completely separate secularist opposition to Morsy that has been recently making its presence felt—the pro-military/pro-Shafiq crowd that viscerally hates the Brotherhood, but also deeply distrusts most of the secular revolutionaries.

On August 24, around 2000 people staged a defiant and decidedly angry protest outside the presidential palace, openly calling for a new revolution to purge the Brotherhood from power. The protest was most notable for the sense of pure paranoid rage coursing through the crowd. Several protesters told me that Morsy had stolen the presidential elections with the help of the U.S. government and the biased media. Two different television camera crews were attacked by the protesters.

“I’m here to bring down the Brotherhood. Their presence is illegitimate,” shouted Farida Mansour, a mid-50’s homemaker and one of many women there who wore the tradition Islamic hijab covering her hair. “Ahmed Shafiq won the election. Everybody knows that!”

Shafiq has been overseas, mostly in Dubai, since losing the election; Egyptian prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest at the end of the last month on corruption charges if he returns. But he remains a polarizing force and focal point for the free-floating anti-Brotherhood anger that simmers in some corners of Egypt’s secular society. If he were to return, or even if he forms a party from de facto exile, it could capture a surprising amount of reactionary protest momentum, buoyed by support from the vestiges of the old Mubarak regime.

Put simply, the pro-Shafiq secularist opposition regards the more revolutionary contingent as dangerous radical hippies, while the revolutionary crowd regards the Shafiq supporters as retrograde counter-revolutionaries who seek to dial back the clock to the Mubarak era. They both share a common enemy, and some politicians have spoken of forging an alliance between the two camps, but other observers find that impossible to imagine. “There are those who are angry and want things to go back to the way they were. For these people Shafiq and company are a natural solution,” says Sabry. “The progressive bloc is unable to reach out to that crowd. There’s too much distrust on both sides.”

Does the Internet Really Make Everyone Crazy?

Even as I'm posting this, I often have this very question........ is the Internet making me CRAZY?! 
Somedays I think so and wonder if I would be better off without it!!! :)

Sociologists call them moral panics — when a population pins its unanchored fear in uncertain times on a selected demon, whether or not the target is really a threat to society. Drugs are a frequent focus of these societal anxiety attacks, but this week, Newsweek tries to foment a classic panic against a more universal foe: the Internet.

Headlined online “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?” the article begins with the story of Jason Russell, the filmmaker behind the “Kony2012″ video about the African cult-leader and warlord Joseph Kony. After the video went viral and suddenly brought Russell international fame, he wound up naked and ranting on a San Diego street corner. To make the case that the Internet caused Russell’s psychotic break, the Newsweek article rapidly generalizes from rare, extreme experiences like Russell’s and wends through a selective reading of the research to argue, in the words of one quoted source, that the Net, “encourages — and even promotes — insanity.”

According to senior writer Tony Dokoupil:

The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.

The problem is, this conclusion runs counter to what the research data actually show.

Dokoupil makes much of brain scan studies suggesting that Internet use “rewires” the brain in ways that look similar to changes seen in drug addiction. The reality is that any enjoyable activity leads to changes in the brain’s pleasure regions if a person engages in it frequently enough. Indeed, any activity we perform repeatedly will lead to brain changes: that’s known as learning. Riding a bicycle and playing the violin also rewire the brain, but we don’t choose to refer to these changes as “damage.”

As yet, there is no brain scan that can clearly determine whether certain brain changes signify addiction or simple, harmless enjoyment. Nor can brain scans predict, in the case of addiction, who will be able to regain control over their behavior and who will not.

Dokoupil cites a study that scanned 24 people, some experienced Web users and some who were less proficient. He says that the regular users had “fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes,” but he fails to mention that the research only explored people’s Google use — comparing Google aficionados to newbies. He writes further that just five hours of time spent online (using Google) “rewired” the brains of the new users. This, of course, tells us nothing about addiction: we don’t know if the experienced Google searchers were even having trouble controlling their Internet use, or whether, based on one small study, a tiny bit of experience learning how to search the Web can “rewire” the brain dramatically. If so, then everyone’s addicted — or no one is, and the brain changes are meaningless.

Dokoupil acknowledges that the research linking Web and smartphone use to psychiatric problems cannot show clear cause and effect, but he brushes off this important caveat with quotes from experts who conduct this research and use it to confirm their own clinical observations — in other words, anecdotes, which are an even sketchier source of data — and make causal claims.

In truth, the research linking Internet use to addiction, depression or other behavioral and psychiatric problems simply cannot determine whether being online causes these ills or whether people who are already prone to such problems tend to go online more. In fact, there’s better evidence (not mentioned in the article) that the Internet can be used to treat anxiety and depression than there is suggesting it causes these problems. Randomized controlled trials of online therapy for depression have found it to be as effective as traditional therapy — and only randomized controlled trials, not the observational data cited by Newsweek, can scientifically demonstrate cause and effect.

Dokoupil also approvingly cites an expert who has become a target of widespread ridicule in the science blogosphere for her extreme claims about Internet-related brain damage. Baroness Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford, told Dokoupil in her typically understated way that the Internet problem “is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change.”

Greenfield has never published a study on Internet use. The logic behind her claims is often befuddling: for example, this is how she attempted to explain why she believes the Internet has something to do with the recent rise in autism, in a 2011 interview with the Guardian: “I point to the increase in autism and I point to Internet use. That’s all.” Obviously, that is not scientific reasoning, which is why her comments inspired an Internet meme (among other outrage and disdain) that trended on Twitter.

Dr. Ben Goldacre, a leading British science journalist and author of the “Bad Science” blog, sums up the criticisms of Greenfield this way: “[Her ideas] are never set out as a clear hypothesis, in a formal academic publication, with the accompanying evidence and a clear suggestion of what research programmes might be planned to clarify any uncertainties.”

The Newsweek feature also highlights stories from China, Taiwan and Korea, where Internet addiction has been accepted as a genuine psychiatric problem and treatment centers have been set up to deal with it. “Tens of millions of people (and as much as 30 percent of teens) are considered Internet-addicted” in these countries, Dokoupil writes.

Those facts, however, don’t necessarily mean that Internet addiction exists, let alone that it is widespread. Simply naming a disease and treating it doesn’t make it real, no more than the existence of witch hunts proves the existence of witches. Indeed, some of the treatments used for Internet addiction, such as the abusive Internet treatment boot camps in China where several teens have died, suggest how easily the cure can become worse than the disease when unproven therapies for ill-defined problems spring up. (Boot camps have never been shown to help with any form of addiction.)

In fact, while expanding the diagnoses for addiction overall, the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, which will be published next year, rejected Internet addiction as a bona fide disorder. The Newsweek article spun this fact, highlighting instead that Internet addiction “will be included for the first time, albeit in an appendix tagged for “further study.’”

The truth is, we really don’t know much about how our online lives are affecting us. It’s quite possible that Internet use has the deleterious effects critics suggest — certainly some people do have difficulty controlling the amount of time they spend online. But is it the addictive effect of the Internet that keeps us checking our work emails on vacation or during evenings and weekends — or is it the fact that we fear we may lose our jobs if we don’t?

The Internet might indeed be a cause of our societal worries, but not necessarily because we’re addicted to it. And creating a moral panic based on flimsy evidence isn’t going to help, no matter what the real cause of our problems.

Marriage After One Month At The Age of 85

My friend Lena  and Roland  got married as teenagers in Chattanooga, Tenn., during World War II.

A month ago, the two 85-year-olds got re-hitched in Buffalo, nearly 50 years after they divorced.  Funny how the world works.

I asked Lena why in the world she got divorced to begin with?

She laughed and said, "There was too much to do!"

God Bless her!

So I aksed Roland.

He said, "I always thought it might happen.  It was always in the back of my mind. We're just thankful that we could get back together."

"I think we just kept thinking about each other all the time, even though we were so far apart," said Lena, a widow after her second marriage.

Well, today they made it official: they are married for a full month!

I hope each of you celebrate your marriage in whatever special way you each see fit!

God Bless the two of you!

Navy SEAL to release book on bin Laden raid, publishing company says

A book company said Wednesday that it will release on September 11 a firsthand account of the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Christine Ball, director of marketing and publicity for Dutton, a subsidiary of Penguin Group USA, said the book was written by a Navy SEAL under a pen name.

The book is entitled "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden."

A Department of Defense official said the SEAL is no longer on active duty.

Ex-SEALs slam Obama

New bin Laden movie trailer released

Adm. McRaven on the bin Laden raid

U.S. Special Operations Command has not reviewed the book or approved it, the official said. Officials only recently became aware the former SEAL was writing a book but were told it encompasses more than just the raid and includes vignettes from training and other missions.

They would like to see a copy, the official said, to make sure no classified information is released or the book contains any information that might out one of the team members.

Officials have been told that some of the profits are going to charity.

About two dozen U.S. Special Operations members and two helicopters were involved in the raid early May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed bin Laden.

The raid occurred in a span of 38 minutes, after CIA reports of repeated sightings of a tall man doing "prison yard walks" around the yard of the housing compound in Abbottabad, which was under constant surveillance, an official said on condition of anonymity a few days after the raid.

U.S. authorities did not definitively determine beforehand that the man was bin Laden, but they eventually concluded that there was enough evidence to go through with the operation.

One helicopter made a hard landing when it apparently came too close to a wall. It landed inside the western side of the compound with its tail rotor over the southern wall.

The first man killed in the mission -- which the U.S. official said was code-named Operation Neptune Spear -- was the Kuwaiti courier who had worked for bin Laden. He was shot dead after a brief gunfight in a guest house. From that point on, it is believed no other shots were fired at the U.S. forces, the official said -- which contrasts with early U.S. government reports describing the operation as a "firefight."

The troops then moved into the compound's three-story main building, where they shot and killed the courier's brother. As they went upstairs and around barricades, one of bin Laden's sons rushed at them and was killed. Neither of these men had weapons either on them or nearby, the official said.

The U.S. official said that the team then entered the third-floor room where bin Laden was, along with his Yemeni wife and several young children. The al Qaeda leader was moving, possibly toward one of the weapons that were in the room, when he was shot, first in the chest and then in the head. He never had a gun in hand but posed an imminent threat, according to the U.S. official.

Bin Laden's body was flown to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, then in the North Arabian Sea. After DNA tests and further confirmations of his identity, he was buried at sea within 12 hours of his killing "in conformance with Islamic precepts and practices," White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

President Obama met with some of the Navy SEALs, often referred to as SEAL Team Six and officially as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The U.S. raid, which was conducted without the knowledge of Pakistan, enraged the Pakistani public and embarrassed its military.

Three months later, 15 members of Seal Team Six were killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are working on a movie about the raid.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is about the decade-long hunt for bin Laden. Bigelow and Boal are the team behind the 2008 Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker."

The new movie was said to be set for release just before the election, but after Republicans complained that it was a pro-Obama ad, it was pushed back until December. There is some dispute over whether it was ever meant for release before December.

The movie has been the focus of a Washington partisan fight since last summer.

The Pentagon's inspector general began an inquiry after questions were raised by Rep. Peter King, R-New York.

He demanded investigations by the Department of Defense and CIA inspectors general into what, if any, classified information about Special Operations tactics, techniques and procedures were leaked to the filmmakers, calling the film a "potentially dangerous collaboration" between liberal filmmakers and the administration.

Some of what those investigations found did show collaboration between the administration and the filmmakers, but Defense Department and White House officials have said it's no different than what they give many filmmakers and news reporters on a regular basis.

Will money buy the White House?

By the end of July, Mitt Romney had widened his cash advantageover President Obama by $62 million. Romney has also been raising more money than Obama in the last three months.

In case you haven't noticed, this election season is awash in money.

If Romney continues to outraise Obama, does it mean that he will win the presidential race? Can money buy elections?

Historically, the candidate who raises the most money is likely to win. In recent presidential elections, the only victors whose campaign committees raised less than their opponent were Bill Clinton in 1996 (raising $116.8 million to Sen. Bob Dole's $134.7 million) and Ronald Reagan, who raised less than Jimmy Carter but nevertheless swept into Washington in a 1980 landslide.

In both instances, the comparison of funds raised is limited to their primary campaigns as, unlike today, these candidates relied exclusively upon the presidential public financing system which provided funds in equal amounts to both major party candidates for their general election campaigns.
Fortunately, for candidates in any given race, money alone provides no guarantee of victory. Candidates need exceptional campaign skills, a solid election team, charisma, name recognition and it helps to be an incumbent who usually has these attributes and whose viability often attracts more donations.

Over the last decade, we've seen that in the vast majority of congressional races, those who raised the most money emerged victorious. In 2004, Senate candidates who raised the most moneywon 88% of the time and House candidates who raised the most money won an astonishing 97.8% of the time. It is a testament to money's influence that even in what was widely considered to be a "wave election" in 2010, when the political environment favored the GOP, candidates with the most money still held sway in most of the races.

Still, money is essential. For example, in the 2010 cycle (including both primaries and general elections), only 9 winning House challengers spent under $1 million. Candidates need a lot of resources to conduct a meaningful campaign and, these days, that costs $1.4 million for an average House seat and up to hundreds of millions to take the White House.

In 2012, money is even more important because candidates are not just competing with their electoral opponent anymore, but also with the messages and money from highly professionalized super PACs and nonprofits with lots of campaign experience. These unfamiliar groups' agendas may or may not be clear to candidates, or the voters they're trying to influence.

Outside spending is now the hallmark of America's elections, particularly in tight races.

Expect to see record spending this year, which will largely come from very few donors. While the presidential campaigns are raising less money overall than in 2008, money spent by super PACs and secretive nonprofits, ostensibly independently, to influence elections is soaring. Groups across the political spectrum are making "independent expenditures" and "issue ads" that talk about candidates and issues without explicit "vote for" messages.

This is the evolutionary effects of two critical changes in the campaign finance world. One is the demise of the presidential public funding program and the other is the formal legal sanctioning of unlimited and unrestricted spending directed at candidates.

Since 1976, the presidential public financing system included matching funds for small contributions in primaries and equal grants for the two general election nominees. Beginning with George W. Bush rejecting public matching funds in the 2000 primary campaign (and the spending limits that went with them), that system was diminished incrementally until 2008 when Obama's rejection of general election funding spelled its final demise.

The system was far from perfect, but it offered an equal base from which the two presidential candidates could conduct the eight or nine week sprint to the finish. And it would reduce the fundraising frenzy that now surrounds this presidential race.

Witness how Paul Ryan began his tenure as Romney's running mate with a stop at the Venetian Hotel to meet Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has previously said he will spend up to $100 million to ensure President Obama's defeat. Team Obama, meanwhile, is holding exclusive, coast-to-coast fundraisers in homes of the super-rich, giving face time (with the president, vice president, first lady and various other celebrities) to those who can bring $70,000 or so to the table.

Similarly, a series of judicial and regulatory decisions in recent years has yielded a system in which unlimited funds from virtually any source can be brought directly into the campaign at any time, often with no indication of who is paying the bill. The maze of obscure organizations designed to coordinate these outside efforts and obfuscate their financial sources is just one more example of the cynical efforts of the political class to bend the rules and manipulate the process in hopes of gaining some small advantage on Election Day. It's an attitude that is not lost on an already frustrated electorate that finds little in the political process worthy of respect.

The result is an atmosphere where candidates and parties must raise upwards of $20 million or more each week or risk falling behind. The airwaves are saturated in an unprecedented effort to influence voters in the dozen states up for grabs this year. In the largest of these states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia) the campaigns, super PACs and other shadowy groups have spent an average of nearly $30 million each month since May, levels not seen until late fall in the closest of previous presidential races.

We've reached the point in the campaign where groups running issues ads that identify a candidate would normally have to disclose their donors. But in a cynical move, groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS readily admit to employing evasive tactics which, ironically, require that they take a more aggressive position for or against the candidate, in exchange for which they may completely dodge disclosure of their donors.

Meanwhile, we move toward fall pretending that our campaign finance system remains sound and will protect us when, in some key respects, the rules and disclosure that the Citizens United decision, and the entire system, depends on no longer exist.

Partisan advantage appears to have replaced institutional dysfunction as the driving forces behind the eroding disclosure of those "paying the piper" in this election. The question is whether and when enough people will engage their representatives and collectively demand more authentic dialogue and intellectually honest leadership from lawmakers in Washington. If there is to be any hope of change, this is step No. 1. Otherwise, we shouldn't be surprised when, come 2013, we start hearing a new tune, but can't see who's calling it.

Meanwhile, Romney, Obama, their parties and the outside groups that support them are all locked in an exhaustive race for funds. While Romney has done well compared to Obama in the last few months, the Obama campaign has raised far more overall this cycle. Both camps will have enough money to get their message out, but only one will win the election. In the end, money may not be the only reason, but if history is any indication, whichever candidate raises more of it will likely be our next president.