ed hardy discount

CONCORD, N.H. As candidates crisscross New Hampshire in their quest for votes, an Academy Award-winning writer thinks the time is ripe for “Political Suicide.”

That is the title of four one-act plays Ernest Thompson who wrote “On Golden Pond”_ will stage beginning Sunday at Pitman’s Freight Room in Laconia.

The plays are dark comedies that parody politicians and protesters alike.

One is about taking the best attribute from each of the candidates to make one candidate who might excite two jaded polling place workers. Another is about a small-town protester who longs to be part of a movement but attracts the attention of no one but the police chief.

Thompson told the Associated Press on Friday that the plays each take a different angle on where our culture is at, but called them “equal opportunity offending plays.”

“I like stirring things up a little,” Thompson said.

Thompson bills his plays as “funnier than the debates” and said the debates inspired one of the plays “Mr. Potato Head” about rolling all the candidates into one dynamic candidate.

“They were pretty funny to watch those debates but also pretty sad, because you kept thinking someone has to stand up and say something profound,” Thompson said.

Thompson says he purposely did not shape his characters to resemble any of the current candidates.

“What I’m hoping is that four years from now we can do these same plays and they’ll have the same resonance,” he said.

Thompson wrote one of the plays_ about a disillusioned senator _six years ago. He says he wrote the other three recently, as campaigning intensified.

The 1981 movie “On Golden Pond” filmed in New Hampshire netted Oscars for Thompson and stars Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Last summer Thompson directed the stage production of the play, which he wrote in 1978 for a summer stock theater in Holderness.

Thompson, 62, moved to New Hampshire from Los Angeles 21 years ago.

“The fun part of being in New Hampshire is that you really get to see those characters up close and personal,” he said of the candidates.

Thompson said he chose Pitman’s Freight Room in downtown Laconia in part because of the short commute from his home and production studio in New Hampton. He said the venue holds about 70 and features a stage they assembled for the 16 performances, including one the night of the primary Jan. 10. The play runs through Jan. 15,wholesale Ed hardy sunglasses, then reopens for six additional performances in early February.

Pitman’s owner Dick Mitchell said that there is a lot of buzz around town about Thompson’s production and that it’s exciting for the renovated train depot to host its first theater production.

“It’s very timely, and I think his message is on target everything is screwed up,” Mitchell said.

Thompson he had a run-in with the Mitt Romney camp Friday not over politics, but turf.

Romney campaign workers wanted to take over Pitman’s Freight Room for nine hours Friday to set up for and stage an evening rally, Mitchell said. But Thompson has dibs on the property.

“The show has to go on,” Thompson said, laughing.

WASHINGTON Executing a classic Washington dodge, Newt Gingrich told Americans that Medicare and Medicaid could be kept solid merely by ending fraud in the system, a promise of gain without pain that ignores the aging population and other great forces pressing on the programs.

Mitt Romney told voters he’s done the math supporting his claim that he created more than 100,000 jobs in the private sector, but didn’t share it. And Ron Paul came up with a shocking figure on Fed “bailouts” that bears little resemblance to reality.

A look at some of the claims in a pair of weekend Republican presidential debates and how they compare with the facts:

___

GINGRICH: “The duty of the president is to find a way to manage the federal government so the primary pain is on changing the bureaucracy. On theft alone, we could save $100 billion a year in Medicaid and Medicare if the federal government were competent. That’s a trillion dollars over 10 years. And the only people in pain would be crooks.”

THE FACTS: Those who have crunched the numbers believe that squeezing every last penny of fraud from health care programs would not solve long-range problems that are at the heart of the federal government’s budget woes and imperil Medicare and Medicaid.

Those problems are driven by an aging population, the cost of high-tech medicine and what some researchers see as a pattern of overtreatment the widespread use of medical tests, procedures, drugs and devices that wind up being of little or no benefit to patients.

If policymakers once viewed health care fraud as akin to a cost of doing business, that hasn’t been the case for years. President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law toughened penalties and gave law enforcement agencies new tools to combat fraud. That built on earlier efforts by the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Health care fraud investigations are a major source of money recovered for taxpayers by the Justice Department, surpassing fines and penalties collected from defense contracting fraud.

Although cracking down on fraud and abuse will help to maintain Medicare and Medicaid, the administration and lawmakers are convinced it is not a magic elixir to restore the financial health of the programs. Knowing that has not stopped a succession of presidents and lawmakers of both parties from ducking tough choices and promising painless dividends by going after “waste, fraud and abuse” in government.

___

PAUL: “I don’t see how we can do well against Obama if we have any candidate that, you know, endorsed, you know, single-payer systems and TARP bailouts and don’t challenge the Federal Reserve’s $15 trillion of injection bailing out their friends.”

THE FACTS: First, there are no fans of government-run, single-payer health insurance in the Republican field, despite Paul’s suggestion otherwise Sunday. Newt Gingrich once endorsed the idea of requiring everyone to have health insurance, and Romney introduced a mandate for health coverage as Massachusetts governor. But that’s a far cry from a Canadian-style health system that makes government the primary payer of people’s medical bills.

TARP is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that was proposed by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress in 2008 to help rescue imperiled financial institutions. Nearly all of the money has been paid back, with interest.

Paul’s slam against the Fed ignores the fact that most of the $15 trillion he is talking about involved loans that were quickly repaid, sometimes the next day. And that’s if these Fed transactions can even be considered loans in the conventional sense.

When the Fed lends money to banks, it creates the money out of thin air. When the banks pay it back, the money disappears from the system. If a bank borrows $5 billion from the Fed one day, then pays it back the next, and a week later borrows $5 billion more and quickly pays it back, the total would be listed as $10 billion, even though it’s just the same money going back and forth and the treasury is in no sense being emptied.

That’s how a federal report counted a running total of about $15 trillion in emergency Fed loans to domestic banks and their foreign subsidiaries between 2007 and 2010. The actual loan total, once paybacks are accounted for, is estimated at $1.1 trillion.

___

ROMNEY: “In the business I had, we invested in over 100 different businesses and net-net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs…. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.”

THE FACTS: Romney has never substantiated his frequent claim that he was a creator of more than 100,000 jobs while leading the Bain Capital private equity company. His campaign merely cites success stories without laying out the other side of the ledger jobs lost at Bain-acquired or Bain-supported firms that closed, trimmed their workforce or shifted employment overseas.

Moreover, his campaign bases its claims on recent employment figures at three companies Staples, Domino’s and Sports Authority even though Romney’s involvement with them ceased years ago.

By that sort of charitable math, President Barack Obama could be credited with creating over 1 million jobs even though employment overall is down about 2 million since he came to office. But Romney accuses Obama of destroying jobs while using a different standard to judge his own performance cherry-picked examples that leave everything else out.

By its nature, venture capitalism often results in lost jobs because profitability and efficiency are key to investors, not how many people are on the payroll. Bain Capital profited in cases where employment went both up and down.

Staples, now with close to 90,000 employees, and Sports Authority, with about 15,000, were startups supported by Romney. The direct workforce at Domino’s has grown by nearly 8,000 since Romney’s intervention. But Romney got out of the game in 1999, which has not stopped his campaign from crediting him with jobs created at those companies since then.

Romney toned down the braggadocio in the Saturday debate, saying that of the Bain-supported companies that grew, “we’re only a small part of that, by the way.” But he mentioned a few more successful companies, again without giving voters a breakdown of his “net-net” calculations.

No one has been able to produce a full accounting of job gains and losses from the scores of companies Romney dealt with at Bain. But a Los Angeles Times review of Bain’s 10 largest investments under Romney found that four of the big companies declared bankruptcy within a few years, costing thousands of jobs and often pension and severance benefits.

__

GINGRICH: “Under Obama, 2011 was the highest price of gasoline in history. It is a direct result of his policies, which kill jobs, raise the price of heating oil and gasoline, weaken the United States, increase our dependence on foreign countries and weaken our national security in the face of Iran trying to close the Straits of Hormuz.”

FACT CHECK: It’s true that the average price of gas last year was a record: $3.52 per gallon. Tying that completely to Obama is a stretch because some of the reasons for expensive fuel have nothing to do with him or the United States.

Oil and gas prices jumped early last year due to the political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The revolt in Libya, for example, cut off about 1.5 million barrels of daily oil exports. While that’s only a small part of what the world uses, global demand was rising at the same time as fast-growing economies in the developing world, such as China and India, needed more oil.

The Republican candidates almost uniformly blame Obama for hindering U.S. energy development, taking their cue from his moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a ban now lifted. Oil and gas companies have been ramping up extraction of oil and gas from shale rock deposits in states such as North Dakota and Texas.

All told,wholesale Ed hardy scarves, there is now a boom in oil drilling and extraction of natural gas in the U.S. Active U.S. oil rigs increased 22.5 percent in 2011, and the oil and gas extraction industry added 25,000 jobs, up 12 percent.

___

ROMNEY: “I cut programs, a whole series of programs. By the way, the number one to cut is Obamacare. That saves $95 billion a year.”

THE FACTS: That math looks like it doesn’t add up. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that House Republicans’ legislation to repeal Obama’s health care law would have actually increased federal deficits by $210 billion from 2012 to 2021.

Romney’s statistic approximates how much the government expects to be spending annually once the law’s provisions are fully rolling. But it appears to ignore the law’s revenue-generating provisions, such as a tax on the most generous insurance plans and fees imposed on parts of the health care industry.

___

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Tom Raum, Christopher S. Rugaber, Nancy Benac, Charles Babington and Jim Drinkard contributed to this report.

NEW YORK In 2012, the year of the Mayan apocalypse, an outbreak of spots is going to spread across the world. And Damien Hirst is to blame.

That’s right, next January the Gagosian Gallery will mount simultaneous shows of the YBA’s “spot” paintings in of its 11 outposts around the globe, displaying the complete collection of the works produced between 1986 and 2011. Only about half of the collection will be for sale, with the rest on loan.

It will mark the beginning of a gargantuan comeback attempt by the artist,wholesale Ed hardy jeans, whose Tate Modern retrospective opening in April — which will coincide with the 2012 Summer Olympics in London — will allow crowds to take in the full breadth of work by the former bad-boy artist. His output in recent years has been overtaken by his evidently growing obsession with the art market — a market he became synonymous with after his $200 million one-man Sotheby’s sale in 2008.  

Hirst claims to have been batting around the idea of a major spot  retrospective of his spot paintings for a long time, and even had a show planned years ago in two venues in London — the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Britain — but they never happened. When Hirst recently proposed the idea to Larry Gagosian, the megadealer recognized an opportunity. Gagosian rarely has a show span two of his galleries, let alone 11, but such is the star power of Hirst.

If the exhibition succeeds in gathering the full collection, the art world will finally be able to solve the mystery of how many spot paintings Hirst’s factory has produced. While many guess the number is in the high hundreds, even 1,000, no one knows for sure.

While the transnational show is certainly an attention-getting concept, the lingering question is how it might affect the market for Hirst’s work. Clearly, it’s a risk to flood the market with an extraordinary supply of similar paintings. Then again, it has been well-known for years that Hirst mass-produces his spots, and that doesn’t seem to deter collectors from paying over $1 million for them. Last February, “Arginine Decarboxylase,” a Hirst spot painting from 1994, sold for over £880,000 ($1.4 million) at Christie’s in London, 50 percent above its high estimate.