Calvin Borel atop Preakness winner Rachel Alexandra, the first female to win the race since 1924.
The last leg of racing's Triple Crown runs in three weeks at New York's Belmont race track. And whether or not he rides Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird -- whose late charge nearly clipped Rachel Alexandra in the Preakness -- Calvin Borel has already won life's race.
It has been the rhythm of his life since he began his apprenticeship in Vinton, La., where Cecil had a stable of 60 horses at Delta Downs. Borel remains Boo, short for Boo-Boo, which his parents, Clovis and Ella, thought they had made when their fifth son was born. On the racetrack, he is called Bo-Rail for his insistence on taking the shortest route.
Borel learned the business from the ground up, mucking out stalls, changing horses’ bandages, rubbing their legs, working them out in the mornings and racing them in the afternoons. Fourteen-hour days were the norm, and Cecil was a demanding teacher.
“We didn’t have much book education,” Cecil Borel said. “But we’ve worked very hard. I’m proud that Calvin has earned everything he’s gotten.”
When Borel broke ribs, punctured a lung and had his spleen removed after a spill at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette, La., Cecil was among the first to comfort him. When Borel returned to the track, however, Cecil put him on the same horse, a filly named Miss Touchdown, for his first race.
Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz told Fox that she believes the Obama administration is only "interested in releasing things that really paint America in a negative light." In Cheney's view, the White House has decided "to side with the terrorists" by putting "information out that hurts American soldiers." Cheney also questioned whether the President really cares about American troops.
The apple fell right next to the tree. You stay classy, little lady.
It almost doesn't seem fair to include Billo the Clown in "Douchebag" competition since he is so overpowering on a daily basis. "Douchies" really ought to be for the occasional ignominious outburst by someone who generally knows precisely what they are prevaricating. But since he invoked Nazis (and thus Godwin's Law) he gets an honorable mention.
Here we link Keith Olbermann with the blow-by-blow smackdown of O'Reilly:
And finally, inaugural week runner-up Smokey Joe Barton gets in on the "Douchebag"action again this week, with his conflation that CO2 exhaled by people is the same thing as CO2 emitted by chemical plants (via Think Progress):
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), known as “Smokey Joe” for his efforts on behalf of big polluters, is one of Congress’s most aggressive deniers of man-made climate change. For instance, in March, he said that the climate is changing “for natural variation reasons” and that to deal with it, humans should just “get shade.”
In a new interview with Newsmax, Barton continued his nonsensical approach to the issue, claiming that the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide would potentially “close down the New York and Boston marathons“:
Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.
“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”
One indication that the EPA likely would consider 20,000 runners a single source of pollution is that the agency is trying to regulate waste-water runoff and emissions of drilling rigs in oil fields by attempting to define entire areas as a single source of pollution, Barton says.
Natural sources of CO2 occur within the carbon cycle where billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 are removed from the atmosphere by oceans and growing plants, also known as ‘sinks,’ and are emitted back into the atmosphere annually through natural processes also known as ‘sources.’ When in balance, the total carbon dioxide emissions and removals from the entire carbon cycle are roughly equal.
Since the Industrial Revolution in the 1700’s, human activities, such as the burning of oil, coal and gas, and deforestation, have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution.
In the interview, Barton mocked the EPA’s recent declaration that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare. “There’s never been anybody who’s been treated in an emergency room for CO2 poisoning. It doesn’t cause asthma; it doesn’t cause your eyes to water; it doesn’t cause cancer.”
At a White House news conference flanked by industry officials, Obama called the meeting of officials "who often fought with each other" a "historic day, a watershed event in the long quest for health care reform."
Bullshit. $2 trillion can be "saved" in healthcare costs? What is being lost? Healthcare profits? Research?
"If these savings are truly achieved, this may be the most significant development on the path to health care reform," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which advocates for expanded health care coverage. "It would cut health costs for families and businesses, and it would enable adequate subsidies to be offered so that everyone has access to quality affordable health care."
Six medical trade groups, including the American Medical Association and America's Health Insurance Plans, which represents health insurance companies, have agreed to the cost-cutting. Health care costs would continue to rise, just not as quickly.
Organizations representing the biggest players in the health care market promised President Obama on Monday that they'd find ways to cut national health spending by an astonishing $2 trillion over the next 10 years. Later that day, executives from these industries told the press that their companies' bottom lines would not suffer as a result. Whatever happened to Alfred E. Neuman's Cosmic Health Care Equation?
Among other things, this seems to be the latest example of health care industry lobbyists and executives trying to reassure investors that the sweeping reform plan being assembled by the Obama administration and the Democratically controlled Congress isn't going to put them out of business.
I'm still a great deal less concerned about the impact of this on the companies' stock prices, but that's just me.
At a press briefing in Washington Monday, health care executives were asked to explain how, for example, physicians and hospitals could maintain their incomes if spending were $2 trillion less over 10 years.
"I do believe that these savings can be achieved without detrimental impact on all of the groups that you described," Thomas Priselac, the president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Health System said. "It will be important as we go through this reform that the payments that are provided be adequate for people to do what it is we're talking about in a new and different system."
Here's what Jay Gellert, President and CEO of the insurance company Health Net said: "I think we believe that we can do it without undermining the viability" private health care companies, he said. "The unique opportunity that we have now is to provide care to 40 or 50 million people if we successfully do this."
"I think that overall, that the efficiencies we'll bring will more than make up for the cuts, for the savings that we gain," Gellert said.
There's that smell of feces again. Besides the two corporate titans listed above, the assembled participants included PhRMA President (and former Congressman) Billy Tauzin, the heads of Merck, Kaiser, and the AMA, and SEIU chief Andy Stern.
I'm almost as disappointed in Stern helping peddle this crock as I am Obama.
Calvin Borel atop Preakness winner Rachel Alexandra, the first female to win the race since 1924.
