For instance, former astronaut and MIT graduate Dr. Chang-Diaz established Ad Astra Rocket in 2005 to develop his concept vehicle, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket or VASIMR Rocket for short. The first stage was successfully tested last year. NASA and Ad Astra signed an agreement that will lead to testing the rocket on the space station by 2013.One thing we’d like to do is maintain the ISS in orbit. The ISS has to be reboosted every few months; otherwise it gradually falls and burns up in the atmosphere. These reboosts require about 7 metric tons of rocket fuel per year. How much does it cost to get 7 metric tons of rocket fuel into orbit? $140 million. That’s the bill someone has to pay, each year, just for hauling up the fuel. The 200-kilowatt solar-powered VASIMR can do the same thing with about 320 kilograms of argon gas per year, which still costs about $7 million, but it decreases the price by a factor of 20. Of course, we have to make a little money ourselves, so the price decrease won’t be quite that large, but it can still save NASA a lot of money and net us a handy profit.And second, it moves that tonnage far faster. Dr Chang-Diaz believes he can deliver loads from low-Earth orbit to Mars orbit in just 39 days.
A 10- to 20-megawatt VASIMR engine could propel human missions to Mars in just 39 days, whereas conventional rockets would take six months or more. The shorter the trip, the less time astronauts would be exposed to space radiation, which is a significant hurdle for Mars missions. VASIMR could also be adapted to handle the high payloads of robotic missions, though at slower speeds than lighter human missions.Faster, cheaper, better. That's what makes the free market great.
Not happy with the destruction of the American economy, Hillary Clinton now wants to force her high tax nanny care ways on other countries:Hillary, like most Democrats, never saw a rich person they thought wasn't taxed enough. "Rich" is in the eyes of the beholder, and Democrats behold any American making $31,850 or more per year as rich enough to reach into their wallets and grasp as much as they can. It is not known what Hillary means when speaking of "rich" Pakistani's, although I suspect that the floor is much, much lower. Perhaps anyone that can afford their own Oxen.In a testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the top US diplomat reminded rich Pakistanis that they had a duty to enable their government to fund schools and hospitals and to spend more on other social projects by paying taxes.
“The very well-off” in Pakistan “do not pay their fair share for the services that are needed, in health and education primarily,” she observed.
Always wanted to cruise around town in a Roadster from Tesla Motors but found the $101,500 price tag a little too much in these difficult economic times? After all, zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds on pure, quite electric power is pretty impressive.
Images from a section of Rio de Janeiro known as the "Corner of Fear" have been published by undercover journalists. Even in Brazil, where crime is rampant, the pictures have sent shockwaves through the citizenry:A boy steps boldly into the night traffic and waves a gun to bring the cars to a halt, clearing a path for a motorcycle which screeches into the intersection. Riding pillion is another boy, brandishing a machinegun.Criminals thrive in this nation that has some of the most draconian gun laws in the world -- it is ranked 20th in the world for homicides. And then there's this from US Overseas Security Advisory Office:
Later two teenagers, also riding pillion on motorbikes, flash their guns at other motorists; nearby, a boy can be seen taking aim with a rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. Other youths wander the street smoking crack.
For residents, the junction between the busy Dom Helder Câmara and dos Democráticos, in North Rio de Janeiro, has become known as the Corner of Fear — and video footage of daily life there has shocked a nation already familiar with guns and violence.
The criminal threat for Rio de Janeiro is rated by the U.S. Department of State as critical. The Brazilian police and the Brazilian press report that crime continues to increase. Violent crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, carjacking, armed assault, and burglary are a normal part of everyday life. . . .Our loose gun laws lead to this kind of behavior. Wait, they don't? Isn't there a lesson there?
The Government of Brazil (GOB) continues to be locked in an intense struggle against drug gangs for control of large areas of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. The drug gangs control and in essence serve as parallel governments in the majority of the poor areas of the city known as favelas. The drug gangs are obtaining increasingly sophisticated weapons and are demonstrating a willingness to use them in order to maintain control of the areas they occupy. The determination of the government to wrest control of the favelas from the drug gangs has resulted in violent confrontations between the GOB security forces and the drug gangs.
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.Now, if they will only start voting differently because of it.
The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.
According to officials at the time of the review, the unofficial cost estimate to update the system was $187 million. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees the Secret Service, has so far allocated $69 million, including $36 million in the department's most recent budget request.Once the envy of the entire world, American spy agencies have undergone decades of neglect. The FBI's systems were woefully out of date on 9/11. In 2005 they canned the $170 million Virtual Case File project and began working on a $451 million Sentinel project. This project is actually going well, with the first phase completed with all functionality on time and within budget, and the second phase expected to deliver more functionality than originally planned yet extend the milestone date only 3 months.
A Secret Service contracting memo from Oct. 16, 2009, reviewed by ABC News found, "Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating. Networks, data systems, applications, and IT security do not meet current operational requirements. The IT systems lack appropriate bandwidth to run multiple applications to effectively support USSS offices and operational missions around the world."
Yes, like most conservatives, I am not ever going to see eye-to-eye with GOProud on gay marriage. Of course, I am probably not ever going to see eye-to-eye with Paleocons on trade, diehard social conservatives on banning pornography, Libertarians on foreign policy, and Sarah Palin on her endorsement of John McCain. So what? Are we all going to splinter off now? Yes, it's important to stick to our principles, but there also has to be some room for disagreement as well. We do need to be able to say, "Yeah, we may disagree sometimes, but we're still on the same side and can work together on a lot of issues."Well said.
With that in mind, I was glad to see GOProud at CPAC, I'm glad to have them in the Republican Party, and I'm glad to have them in the conservative movement.
Engadget got their hands on something I've been looking forward to: the most gaming power per pound packed into a laptop on the planet, aka the Alienware M11x (now available for pre-order).But power never comes cheap: the M11x starts at $799, and our tester model equipped with an upgraded 1.3GHz SU7300 Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM clocks in at $949. That's pricey, but potentially worth it if you're a serious gamer on the go.And ends with:
It's hard not to love the M11x after spending some time with it. It takes the traditional laptop and netbook formula and tilts the balance in unconventional ways, resulting in novel tradeoffs. . . . It has a slow CPU but a fast GPU that eats battery power voraciously enough that we'd probably just leave switched off until it was time to game -- otherwise known as "most of the time" for us. . . . We're pretty sure those of you who run out to buy one right this second won't be disappointed, but we're going to hold out for NVIDIA Optimus, and maybe a slightly faster processor -- all the while dreaming of keyboards backlit in Engadget blue.Whatever your needs, you have to admit that this is one beautiful machine. But my computing needs aren't so graphic heavy these days, so in truth I'll probably wait for the Samsung Netbook running Chromium OS.
"It's really an extraordinarily unbalanced system because we're
dealing with small businesses who are doing badly, small banks in
trouble, and of course there is an extraordinarily large proportion of
the unemployed in this country who have been out of work for more than
six months and many more than a year," said Greenspan, who headed the
Fed from 1987 to 2006.With both housing starts and auto sales
"dead in the water," he said he thought it would be difficult to make
the case that the economy is poised for a strong rebound.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That qualifies as neither "change" nor "hope".
Greenspan said that while the economy was in worse shape in the Great Depression, the recent financial crisis was potentially more harmful than that in the 1930s because “never had short-term credit literally withdrawn.”
Greenspan said that the gross domestic product may recover to the level of previous peaks earlier this year, even though traditional drivers of growth such as housing starts and motor vehicles were “dead in the water.” He also said small businesses show few signs of improving because lenders are struggling with commercial real estate mortgages.
Here's betting Obama's next round of "stimulus" misses the mark again by ignoring the driving force behind our free market economy, i.e., the small business and American entrepreneurs. After all, the Democrats in the Senate are.
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Republican leaders had demanded a chance to restore provisions Reid dropped earlier this month, including a package of business-related tax cuts. Reid’s decision amounted to a bet that at least a few Republicans wouldn’t vote against his stripped-down bill in an election year when the economy is at the top of the list of voters’ concerns.Technorati Tags: RINO Scott Brown, RINO Susan Collins, RINO Olympia Snowe, RINO Christoper Bond, RINO George Vionovich, Harry Reid and Other Enemies of the Middle Class, Ballooning Unemployment in America, Destruction of the American Economy, Bankrupting America, Stimulus and Other Lies
The provisions eliminated by Reid included an extension in unemployment benefits, a package of individual and business tax cuts worth $31 billion, and provisions preventing looming cuts in Medicare reimbursements to doctors. Reid said lawmakers would take up those items later.
Here we present a simple model of the integrated sea-level response to temperature change that implicitly includes contributions from the thermal expansion and the reduction of continental ice. Our model explains much of the centennial-scale variability observed over the past 22,000 years, and estimates 4–24 cm of sea-level rise during the twentieth century, in agreement with the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1 (IPCC). In response to the minimum (1.1 °C) and maximum (6.4 °C) warming projected for AD 2100 by the IPCC models, our model predicts 7 and 82 cm of sea-level rise by the end of the twenty-first century, respectively. The range of sea-level rise is slightly larger than the estimates from the IPCC models of 18–76 cm, but is sufficiently similar to increase confidence in the projections.The three scientists have now formally retracted their findings. In the announcement, Siddall said that there were two separate mistakes in the paper, eliciting a retraction rather than a correction because the errors undermined the study's conclusion.
One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.
When given a chance additional eyes are able to turn up mistakes. There was a time when all scientists followed research procedure, which includes submitting papers for peer review. Perhaps the recent rash of bad data collection procedures (recording next to incinerators and jet exhaust, really?), falsified data, miscalculations, ignoring conflicting views, propaganda and outright lies.
BusinessWeek reports that the Treasury and Labor departments are asking for public comment on "the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams."Wait. Isn't that what Social Security was supposed to be? What is being suggested is converting your privately-owned retirement savings into another source of public money in return for a second Social Security program. And we all know how well Social Security is doing.
In plain English, the idea is for the government to take your retirement savings in return for a promise to pay you some monthly benefit in your retirement years.
I have no quarrel with the government mandating that you have a choice in your IRA or 401k account to buy short-duration Treasuries - much like the "G" fund that government and civil-service workers have.I'll take that bet.
But - "choices" have a funny way of turning into mandates, and this looks to me like a raw admission that Treasury knows it will not be able to sell its debt in the open market - so they will effectively tax you by forcing your "retirement" money to buy them!
This may be the only way for Treasury to hold down interest rates to something reasonable in the intermediate term, but doing so will instantaneously remove a major source of funding for the stock market - that is, the monthly and quarterly inflows from retirement accounts.
You can bet this won't be good for you, the ordinary American.
Throwing almost $100 billion at education sure as heck ought to have kept teachers in their jobs, and the unemployment numbers suggest teachers have had a pretty good deal relative to the folks paying their salaries. While unemployment in “educational services” – which consists predominantly of teachers, but also includes other education-related occupations – hasn’t returned to its recent, April 2008 low of 2.2 percent, in January 2010 it was well below the national 9.7 percent rate, sitting at 5.9 percent. . . .
As the following chart makes clear, we have added teachers in droves for decades without improving ultimate achievement at all:
. . . Buttars is proposing that students who graduate from high school early be allowed to pay the same amount of money to take college classes during their first year of college as they would have paid to take concurrent enrollment, Advanced Placement and distance learning classes in high school.Buttars says his idea will save the state $60 million per year. I say it's a good thing to get these kids off the public radar as soon as possible and get them into the work force early. More workers, more tax payers. Now if we could only lower taxes and encourage businesses to actually offer jobs . . .
Walking around the District, Abel Lomax can't help but look around and think: What recession?I have friends that were laid off over a year and a half ago and still can't find work. But if you can get to Washington DC, the taxpayer's dollar could soon be yours. If, that is, you are qualified to work in the government sector. For most of the rest of us, white and blue collar alike, times are still rough:
After a stint abroad, it took the 27-year-old just four months to find a job with the government -- not bad for the Great Recession. And the neighborhoods where he spends his time sport new restaurants crowded with patrons enjoying Czech Pilseners and Wagyu beef brisket.
"I don't know if it's because I'm primarily in Northwest, but it really doesn't feel all that bad," Lomax said. . . .
From November 2008 through November 2009, about 27,000 jobs were created in the Washington area, among them positions for lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, federal workers, educators, health professionals and government workers, according to an analysis by Fuller.Technorati Tags: Ballooning Unemployment, Bankrupting American, Destruction of the American Economy, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice
Of the 42,000 jobs lost, about 16,000 were in construction, 9,000 in retail and about 11,000 in financial and information fields that had been in decline since before the recession.
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig describes our national debt as "unsustainable" and says that we have to take "difficult" steps to resolve the problem. Otherwise, the Federal Reserve may not be able to carry out its dual objectives of price stability and maximum sustainable long-term growth.Further, Hoenig recently criticized the IMF's chief economist for proposing that central banks accept higher levels of inflation, saying:The U.S., to curtail the debt, should choose the option that’s the “most difficult and probably the least palatable politically: We can act now to implement programs that reduce spending and increase revenues to a more sustainable level,” Hoenig said.
“I recognize that this last option involves hard choices and short-term pain,” Hoenig said. “However, in my view it is the responsible path to sustainable economic growth with price stability.”
“While this may sound like a reasonable theory from a credible economist, my concern is that it rationalizes solutions to short-term problems that too often take an economy down the wrong path,” Hoenig said.
If he keeps talking sense, Hoenig may soon be my favorite bank dude.
Technorati Tags: Thomas Hoenig, Controlling Inflation, Bankrupting America, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice
In total, of the half a billion dollars sent to Haiti relief organizations contacted by ABC News, 18 percent is already being spent on food and water, Additionally, 11 percent is going toward medical supplies and clinics, six percent on housing, and two percent on operations.There are problems on with both the ability of the charities to manage the unusually large influx of dollars, and problems with international coordination of relief efforts, not to mention the problems with the Haiti infrastructure. Plus, rebuilding is a long-term project and money needs to be left in reserve.
But here's the catch. The money now being spent is only a small fraction of the total donations given. Most of the donations made to the relief efforts -- 69 percent or $325 million -- have not been spent on anything yet.
In fact, after nearly disappearing during the height of the recession, the warmest material of all–fur–is making a high-profile comeback at the weeklong parade of fashon shows that kicked off Thursday. Designers including Catherine Malandrino, Alexander Wang, Rebecca Taylor, Diane von Furstenberg and Zac Posen have incorporated furs and fleeces, ranging from Himalayan fox and sable to Mongolian lamb and goat, into their lines.Furs were featured in collars and trim, knitted into sweaters, dyed, or sewn together with fabric or leather, as in an elegant coat that Carolina Herrera showed Monday morning at Manhattan's Bryant Park.
Can't wait for PETA's reaction.
Technorati Tags: Fashion Fur, Global Warming and Other Myths
The Obama response has come in two parts. One is to try to get better about communicating to people that he is fighting to address exactly what angers them. The other is to put the onus on whomever he deems is getting in the way of progress, hoping to shift the heat onto them. . . .Bottom line is that the message of "change" will be used against him. Successfully.
"It's perhaps a winning strategy in the short term," said David Gergen, a political analyst and former adviser to four presidents. "It will help to align him with those who are frustrated. But it is not a winning strategy over the long haul. You can't run for re-election pointing to all the things that are wrong with the system."
“It’s clear that we’re in a period of inflation volatility, and we may see a further increase in the short term,” said Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec Securities in London. “This is a big increase, but it was pretty well flagged. We’re not too concerned about the medium-term outlook for inflation.” . . .Which begs the question: what will happen in the US when taxes drive up prices and the fact that we've been printing money at an unacceptable rate finally enters consumer consciousness? Wait, according to the Economist, inflation is just another tool in the money/economy manipulation tool chest:
“If inflation doesn’t start to fall back as rapidly as they project -- and by the middle of this year we will have an early sense of that -- that could be the point where their credibility starts to get tested a bit more,” said Ross Walker, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London.
Perhaps the important thing to take away from this discussion is that to central bankers, inflation is a bogeyman. But to good economists, inflation is merely a variable, an economic indicator over which governments have some control and which they can manipulate to good or ill effect. The right approach to inflation is to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of a higher target and determine if, as seems likely, it would be a good idea. It strikes me as a very good thing that prominent economists are raising these questions, and it would be a better thing still if central bankers would stop running in fear from the idea of higher inflation and start engaging the arguments on the table.Yes, higher inflation would help us pay off our massive (and increasing) national debt. However, for those of us actually working and paying taxes, it would also drive down the value of our salaries. That may be acceptable collateral damage to the macro economists and politicians, but it's a little more personal to the rest of us "little folk" down here.
Philadelphia TSA screeners forced the developmentally delayed, four-year-old son of a Camden, PA police officer to remove his leg-braces and wobble through a checkpoint, despite the fact that their procedure calls for such a case to be handled through a swabbing in a private room. When the police officer complained, the supervising TSA screener turned around and walked away. Then a Philadelphia police officer asked what was wrong and "suggested he calm down and enjoy his vacation."Who thought it was a good idea to make these people civil servants? Oh yeah. Democrats.
Also quoted in the article is Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, whose analysis has found that the "warming trend" espoused by the IPCC and eco-alarmists are "just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases."“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,”
said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of
Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC. . . .The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics
at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review
its last report.The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a
research paper questioning its methods.“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s
climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation
and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Most damning of all is the admission by Professor Phil Jones, disgraced director of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit who has "lost" the "hockey stick" data, that there is no "statistically significant" data to support the human-caused warming theory. Excerpts from his interview with the BBC:
BBC: Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?Professor Jones' work was a key component of the IPCC report, but now Professor Jones cannot provide the data and subsequent analysis that went into that work, and he is backing away from his position. The UK Daily Mail describes his turnaround this way:
Jones: . . . So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
Exactly.This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement’s argument that our current position is ‘unprecedented’ would collapse.
Must be more of that "transparency" that he promised.Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.
Reliance on commercial launch services will provide many other benefits. It will open the doors to more people having the opportunity to go to space. It has the potential of creating thousands of new jobs, largely the kind of high-tech work to which our nation should aspire. In the same way the railroads opened the American West, commercial access can open vast new opportunities in space. All of this new activity will expand the space enterprise, and in doing so, will improve the economic competitiveness of our country.The pair make a strong argument for privatization of parts of the space program. And he's right -- Republicans should support such efforts.
Kids make giant snowman. Dad makes it cool."My husband is an engineer and decided later on to make the snowman breathe fire," Anna Berte writes. "Hope everyone enjoys this snowman as much as the rest of our neighborhood does."Pretty awesome.
A background note by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said a 2007 report wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level since the figure included areas above sea level, prone to flooding along rivers. . . .While the UN panel claims that this misstatement doesn't change the "core conclusions" about human induced global warming, those of us with normal reasoning powers know that any study that is filled with as many holes as this one can hardly come to any truly scientific conclusions.The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the original source of the incorrect data, said on February 5 that just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding.
The White House has released the 2010 Economic Report of the President as an eBook -- available for Kindle, Nook and ePub (for Sony readers, iPhones, and so on) This is the first time that this report has released in eBook format.
Engadget quips:
Will this be the final step that truly pushes e-books into the mainstream? Probably not. But if this rapid adoption of technology by the White House is any indication, we could well see weekly Presidential addresses in 3D next year.
I'm wondering why the Kindle version costs 99 cents while the Nook and ePub versions are free. Didn't my tax dollars already go for creating this bit of fiction?
Technorati Tags: Economic Report of the President, Lies the Government Tells, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice
This is Washington at its most dysfunctional -- leaving aside the monstrous snow piles cutting down on the parking spots.You know it's bad when the MSM starts noticing how bad things are.
The prospects of actual governance emerging in this environment have rarely seemed bleaker. And yet -- doesn’t someone have to be the grown-up around here?
A public that’s basically soured on everybody: “At a time of deepening political disaffection and intensified distress about the economy, President Obama enjoys an edge over Republicans in the battle for public support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll,” Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee-Brenan report in the Times.
“The poll suggests that both parties face a toxic environment as [they] prepare to face voters in November,” they write. “The percentage of Americans who approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance, at 46 percent, is as low as it has been since he took office.”
Eight percent of respondents said they want members of Congress reelected. Eight.
From Ardmore all the way to Dallas and even in Louisiana, the south is snowed in. For many, it's a winter wonderland in places that rarely see such weather. But none of it comes close to the mess up north where two blizzards have blown through in a week. . . .To send Patrick pictures of snow in your area, click and send to snow@forwarn.org.
"On Friday afternoon, I'm going to begin asking for photos of the snow," Marsh said. "Hopefully I'll get photos from all 50 states, and if I do, I'll put them into a Google Earth map and make a snow snapshot of America."
Marsh said Florida is the only state without snow on the ground at this point, but he said two to four inches of snow is forecasted on Friday in some parts of the state. There is currently even snow on some of the mountain tops in Hawaii.
But it's all about the waaarrrrrmmmmmming!Heavy rain, snow and strong winds lashed central and
southern Italy , prompting the closure of roads in many areas and some schools were shut on the island ofSardinia .In Rome, Ciampino airport was shut and flights diverted to the bigger Fiumicino airport while the city's normally chaotic traffic slowed to a crawl in many areas.
In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls. . . .The government does not need to know where I am, where I was, or who I was with. Ever.
"The biggest issue at stake is whether or not courts are going to accept the government's minimal view of what is protected by the Fourth Amendment," says EFF's Bankston. "The government is arguing that based on precedents from the 1970s, any record held by a third party about us, no matter how invasively collected, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment."
Despite a show of Franco-German unity on the crisis and the first statement from EU leaders pledging to safeguard the currency's stability, hopes on the markets of a German-led rescue plan to shore up Greece's critical public finances were dashed by Merkel, who repeatedly emphasised that Athens would need to put its own house in order and brushed aside all questions of financial support.Watch for the DOW to take another dive tomorrow.
"Germany is stepping totally on the brakes on financial assistance," said a senior EU diplomat. "On legal grounds, on constitutional grounds and on principle." Another senior diplomat said of the Germans: "They're not waving their chequebooks."
Merkel and Sarkozy held a joint press conference after the summit to demonstrate Franco-German unity, but that masked fundamental differences over how to proceed.
"France and Germany cannot agree on anything," said a Brussels official. "They are not always on the same page."
But the report also said that the unemployment rate may not come down much from the current level of 9.7 percent, and may even rise because of labor market growth and the return of more discouraged workers to the labor force.Checking ShadowStats, we see that true unemployment (which includes both short-term and long-term discouraged workers) is still over 21%. As more jobs become available, more of these workers will start filling them. So the artificially low numbers that the government uses to report unemployment will remain in the 10% range.The White House forecast, most of which was previously released with budget documents, calls for growth in gross domestic product of around 3.0 percent in 2010 and an average unemployment rate of 10.0 percent. . . .
"Indeed, it is possible that the rate will rise for a while as some discouraged workers return to the labor force, before starting to generally decline. Consistent with this, employment growth is projected to be roughly equal to normal trend growth of about 100,000 per month."
The school district is using the device to reward parents of children with disabilities who fill out a 10-minute online survey. The district wants to know how well it's connecting with the parents and how to get parents involved in their children's education. . . .
The district has more than 10,000 students with disabilities.
You can give your opinion of this program by taking an online poll. So far, 90% of the respondents are against it. But hey, since when does anyone ask us how to spend our tax dollars?
Technorati Tags: Stimulus and Other Fradulent Wastes of Taxpayer Money, Polk County Florida, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice
Nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year. But the study found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. . . .Further outrages at the end of the story. Go. Read. Angerize yourself. Write your congressman.
"According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S."
More snow and falling temperatures are on their way, Xinhua added.Philadelphia has already experienced the snowiest winter in history, and is bracing for even more snow:
Unseasonably cold weather and ice storms across central and southern
China in 2008 killed at least 129 people, caused transport chaos and
cut off power and water for millions as people struggled to get home
for Chinese New Year.
More than 70.3-inches of snow fell in Philadelphia so far this season and it's not even over. . . .Snowfall in Washington D.C. has blown by the previous record set in 1898:The last record was only set 14 years ago during the
Blizzard of 1996 when 65.5 inches fell -- 33 inches of which were dumped during that storm. . . .We also had more stronger winter storms this season than ever. There are only two other seasons -- 1960-61 and 1978 -- that had more than one storm with 10 or more inches of accumulation since 1888, says Glenn. Neither of those seasons had storms that broke the 20 inch accumulation mark.
It's not often we witness a 100-year-plus record fall. Perhaps it's fitting it went out in such extreme fashion today. As reported here earlier, National Airport's preliminary (2 p.m.) snow total of 54.9" for the 2009-2010 winter thus far puts D.C. above the previous high mark of 54.4" set way back in 1898-1899.Meanwhile in the southern hemisphere, 32 people have died due to a heatwave in southern Brasil:
According to the Inmet national weather service, recorded temperatures in Rio were well above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees) -- and felt more like above 50 degrees.
"The heatwave in Rio is seen as historic. February right now is the hottest month for the past 50 years," meteorologist Giovanni Dolif told the O Globo daily. . . .
The heatwave made Rio the hottest place on the planet on Tuesday, save for Ada, a town in eastern
Ghana , according to data from the World Meteorological Organization.
If we could only come up with ways to artificially enhance El Nino and the gulf stream to spread some of these temperatures out, maybe we could start taking control of the weather. In the meantime, northerners need to bundle up, southerners need to dress light, and everyone needs to suck it up.
Technorati Tags: China, Brasil, Brazil, Snowpocolypse, Global Warming and Other Myths
NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], part of the Department of Commerce, is going to be providing information to individuals and decision-makers through a new NOAA Climate Service office. “More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives,” the release says.Indeed, that would be nice. Yet the latest DC forecast that calls for another 10 to 20 inches of snow as New York prepares for another foot. And Philadelphia is expecting this to be the "snowiest winter on record".
Earlier snowmelt? That would be nice.
Reminds me of the Superbowl halftime show:The most important thing for the public to understand is we're not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11.Obama evidently thinks this should count in his favor. But for anyone who believed his professed commitment to due process and the rule of law, the fact that his anti-terrorist policies are very similar to Bush's is cause for disappointment.
Change it had to come"Change". Now there's a broken promise.
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that's all
But the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war . . .
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
What's the difference between Vegas and Washington D.C.?I recommend reading the whole thing.
In Vegas the drunks gamble with their own money.
With Murtha gone, however, the special election will be seriously contested. Murtha's district is the only one in the country won by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004 and by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, according to Republican sources, and that trend line coupled with the volatile national environment for Democrats ensures Republicans will heavily target the contest.Hopefully, the Club for Growth will find a suitable candidate to back. If so, I'll be sending that person a few dollars.
Yet more news that Iran is beating the war drums.
Iran has opened two production lines to manufacture ‘advanced’ attack drones capable of carrying out attacks with ‘high precision’.
In the past week Iran has announced a spate of technological advances and military achievements in the run up to the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution on Feb 11.
It’s no secret that Iran has been trying to get their hands on Russia's S-300 anti-aircraft system (worried about Israeli air strikes, no doubt). They have tired of waiting and will “soon” unveil their own system:
"In the near future, a new locally-made air defence system will be unveiled by the country's experts and scientists which is as powerful as the S-300 missile defence system, or even stronger," [commander Heshmatollah Kassiri] said. . . .
The truck-mounted S-300PMU1, known in the West as the SA-20, can shoot down cruise missiles and aircraft. It has a range of 150 km (90 miles) and travels at more than two km per second.
Much of this is posturing (ala Comical Ali). On the other hand, there is no doubt that Iran is gearing up to be a major power in the region. This endangers all nearby states, Jewish and Islamic alike.
Approval of how Congress is performing the lowest since Democrats took over DC, mainly due to disappointing the Democrat base. From Gallup:
Gallup notes:
The all-time low Gallup reading on congressional approval is 14%, recorded in July 2008. Prior to this, 18% was the lowest in Gallup's history of asking this question, which dates to 1974. In addition to the current measure, congressional approval was at 18% for several months in 2008 as well as in March 1992. It was only slightly higher in June 1979 (19%) and October 1994 (21%).
Congress enjoyed a bump in public approval at the start of last year as the Obama administration was getting underway -- fueled mostly by enhanced approval among Democrats and independents. Nearly all of that heightened support among independents had peeled off by last fall, and now Democrats are breaking away.
This certainly does not bode well for Democrats in November.
Memphis awoke to a surprise snowfall this morning. Forecasters predicted warm air would come from the south turning light flurries of early snow into rain. Instead, the warm air stalled and is now predicted to get here mid-afternoon.
In the meantime, our roads are covered with snow and very slick, accidents abound, and the city’s salt trucks were still on the lot well into rush hour.
View from AlphaPatriot’s Back Porch
The Gorebot’s home is quite a ways north of here. I wonder what it looks like?
On the other hand, snow is being trucked into Vancouver for the winter Olympics as the area experiences unseasonably warm temperatures.
Trouble is, with opening ceremonies only five days away, the above-freezing temperatures in Vancouver continue to raise concerns for other sports, particularly snowboarding and freestyle skiing, two events being held on the mountain overlooking the city.
The biggest test comes today, when freestyle moguls training sessions are scheduled to begin.
So much for being able to predict global temperatures with any sort of accuracy what-so-ever.
Meanwhile, meteorologists dealing with the east coast Snowpocolypse are freaking out:
Some Haitians? Oh come on, we all knew the day we started sending money to Haiti that the rich and powerful would become more so and that people would die as a result.Donor nations have poured tens of millions of dollars into the impoverished Caribbean nation and some Haitians have blamed corruption for the sometimes sluggish distribution of aid.
Yep, that about covers it. Luckily the U.S. military is coordinating many of the efforts and hopefully this kind of thing has been kept to a minimum.Sacks of donated rice have turned up in local street markets. Aid officials said it was inevitable that some aid would find its way to the black market in Haiti, which was ranked 10th from the bottom of Transparency International's latest corruption rating of 180 nations.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who sought during the 2008 presidential campaign to associate himself with Barack Obama, has become sharply critical of the American president, often comparing Obama unfavorably to himself, according to an article published this week in the authoritative French daily Le Monde.Smart guy, that French dude.
The article quotes Sarkozy twice recently criticizing Obama in public, and says he's twice gone on the record criticizing Obama in recent weeks. Asked last Monday in a television interview of his sweeping attempt to reform several sectors of French government simultaneously, Sarkozy pointed to Obama's made health care reform his sole focus.
"I didn't see that that made things simpler," he said.
USDA estimates up to $58 billion will be spent on food stamps this fiscal year, which ends Sept 30, with average enrollment of 40.5 million people. Food stamps were renamed the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program in 2008.Must be all the "stimulus" I keep hearing about.
U.S. cases have been declining since October. An official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says swine flu cases are still occurring and are likely to continue a while longer at some level.Meanwhile, the Whole Health Organization says that "pandemic activity is declining across most of the world" as deaths have topped -- wait for it -- 15,000 out of the 6.8 billion people on the planet. That translates to 0.00022 percent of the world population.
But another expert said a future large wave of cases now seems very unlikely. The expert, Vanderbilt University's Dr. William Schaffner, said the epidemic has "one foot in the grave."
Some once-flourishing local charities have been unable to survive. Family Services of the Mid-South, a 115-year-old nonprofit, is closing this week after transferring a few of its programs to other agencies. The Destiny Foundation of Central Florida, which ran a children's clinic, thrift store and food pantry in Orlando, has suspended its operations and may close.And that was last year. Children's clinics, homeless shelters for families, food banks, shops that clothe children -- all are in danger as the national debt rises and unemployment remains high.
A recent survey by the Human Services Council of New York City, encompassing 244 local nonprofits, found that 60 percent had seen some decrease in public funding and 73 percent reported reductions in private donations. More than half had laid off staff in the past year, and 35 percent had eliminated programs.
One of the city's oldest and largest charities - the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service - has laid off about 50 of its 550 employees. It's also eliminated a program that helped disabled people make the transition from welfare to work, and scaled down a program that's helping kids from troubled homes avoid foster care.
Those predictions are in line forecasts from independent economists. The administration is predicting 8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011, and 7.9 unemployment percent by the end of 2012.
Given how wrong the Obama's administration has been in predicting unemployment to date, we should all be afraid.
You didn't really believe the "lock box" rhetoric politicians try to sell us on, did you?Instead of helping to finance the rest of the government, as it has done for decades, our nation's biggest social program needs help from the Treasury to keep benefit checks from bouncing -- in other words, a taxpayer bailout.
Social Security hasn't been cash-negative since the early 1980s, when it came so close to running out of money that it was making plans to stop sending out benefit checks. That led to the famous Greenspan Commission report, which recommended trimming benefits and raising taxes, which Congress did. Those actions produced hefty cash surpluses, which until this year have helped finance the rest of the government.
But even then, it was clear the surpluses would be temporary. Now, years earlier than projected, Social Security is adding to the government's borrowing needs, even though the program still shows a surplus on paper.
Democrats will be hard pressed to raise taxes enough to pay down the deficit and save all the entitlement programs. Won't be long before the government will be sending checks to seniors just so they can send a huge chunk of it back in taxes.
So much for my dreams of a comfortable retirement. But at least this may lead to private retirement accounts for young people. Maybe my grandchildren will have a good life in their golden years.
It will soon become clear that the anger behind the Tea Parties was the first sign of something bigger, something much deeper. But of what exactly? My tea leaves reveal two possible futures. First, this new celebration of conservative values may well be focused and directed by the Republican Party, reprising the electoral destruction of the Democrats in the 1994 midterms.A vote against a RINO is not a wasted vote if enough of us stand together. Not a penny to the GOP, which supports any incumbent no matter what their principles as long as they have an "R" behind their name. I'm on a life-long RINO hunt. Because I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.
But the second possibility is that it will be the Republican Party, not the Democrats, that is torn apart trying to deal with its own internal contradictions. That’s what happened in the disastrous but portentous 1964 election: The GOP stood up for principle in its platform, and fell down at the ballot box. . . .
From a Republican perspective, and taking the long view, there’s this to be said: In 1964 a sharp turn towards principle led the Republicans to wander for four years in the electoral desert. But 1964 also laid the foundation for the majorities that put Republicans in the White House, starting in 1968, for all but 12 of the next 40 years. So enjoy your tea, unsweetened.
The quality that gives the Tea Party movement its legitimacy is that it is so fundamentally illegitimate: outside the establishment, bereft of representation on K Street, and without an identifiable face to speak for it on Meet the Press. This is a movement that sprang deep from within the viscera of America, not from some political poll or focus group.Exactly.
It is not Republican; it is not even conservative. It has no interest in debating the merits of No Child Left Behind, abstinence-only sex education or George W. Bush's rationale for going to Iraq. Replacing a "spend and borrow" Democrat with a "spend and borrow" Republican is not the goal of the Tea Party movement.
This movement is simply saying: "We are fine without you, Washington. Now for the love of God, go attend a reception somewhere, and stop making health care and entrepreneurship more expensive than they already are."
Machiavelli once said a republic stays healthy by returning to its first principles from time to time. The Tea Party movement is trying to get our nation back to its first principles to prevent our decline.
The good news is that the Dem president is such an inexperienced, inept, blundering, one-foot-always-in-mouth, out-of-touch, economy-wrecking socialist. That means independents are fleeing from him almost as fast as "moderate" conservatives.With the developments in Illinois and Indiana over the past 24 hours, the Cook Political Report now carries 10 Democratic-held seats in their most competitive categories -- meaning, theoretically, that if Republicans ran the table (and lost none of their own toss up seats in Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio) they could get to 51 seats and the Senate majority.
Is it a longshot? Absolutely. But, remember that recent history has shown that in a national political landscape tipped in favor of one party a strong majority of toss up contests tend to fall that party's way.
The poll of 2,000 Republicans — sponsored by the liberal website but conducted by independent pollster Research2000 — paints a picture of a Republican base that’s angry, disaffected and acutely hostile to President Barack Obama. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans polled think Obama should be impeached, 36 percent say he wasn’t born in the United States and one in four say they aren’t even sure he’s a U.S. citizen. Another 63 percent labeled the president a “socialist.”Well, not "patently crazy", but at least too late. The time to see the birth certificate was during the election, no after he was seated. Time to forge ahead and try to save the country from bankruptcy. Which is why I will not stop calling Obama a socialist. 'Cause he is.
Those numbers are far higher than similar polls of Democrats and independents — polls that reveal dissatisfaction with many of Obama’s programs but not with the president personally.
“It was the first time we ever asked the impeachment question, ... but ask independents if Obama was born in the U.S., and about 85 percent say yes,” said Research2000 President Del Ali.
“This shows a huge vulnerability for Republicans,” says Jef Pollock, a veteran pollster and Democratic strategist working for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) — who was forced to bolt from the GOP after conservative Pat Toomey attacked him from the right.
“Independents, who are particularly disinclined toward any kind of partisan rhetoric, are going to be turned off when they hear Republicans say stuff like this, which is patently crazy,” Pollock said.
Clinton ruined a dress. Obama ruined a nation.Technorati Tags: Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice
Things just keep looking up for Republicans. Must be part of Obama's "change".Without Murtha seeking re-election, however, the district would be extremely competitive. In 2008, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) carried it by less than 1,000 votes (out of more than 260,000 cast) while Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) won the 12th by a narrow 51 percent to 49 percent margin four years earlier. The trend line in the district is not moving in the right direction for Democrats, however, as the Vice President Al Gore carried Murtha's seat with 55 percent in 2000.
Republicans believe Pennsylvania is shaping up as very friendly territory for them. The party has united behind
state Attorney General Tom Corbett in the governor's race and former Rep.Pat Toomey in the Senate contest. On the House side, Republicans see Pennsylvania's 4th, 7th, 8th, 10th and 11th districts as potential pickup opportunities. Democrats see the 6th and 15th districts are chances for them to gain Republican-held seats in the fall.
Hell has frozen over. Pigs are sprouting wings. The left-leaning 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has removed a moonbat judge from the botched LAX millenium bomber case and ruled that his sentence was too short, unreasonable, and in blatant violation of federal sentencing guidelines.Read Michelle's post for the full story. It's rare that you enjoy reading about the Ninth this much.
Yep, another broken promise from the man that evidently can't even live up to the achievements of Nixon, a president that resigned rather than risk impeachment. Hmmm, wouldn't it be nice if history repeated itself?Zhang Xiao'an outlined to Ynet the Chinese perspective on the slump in ties between the US and China. She mentioned that in several occasions, China's ties with new American president usually don't start off so well, but gradually improve with time.
She said that now, there is an opposite process – after Obama was elected last year, ties between China and the United States got off on the right foot, and ever since the recent developments have been deteriorating. . . .
Obama declared on his first day in office that he plans to boost ties with China, and went so far as to say that by the end of 2009, the situation would be "better than ever".
Joblessness topped 10 percent in 138 metro areas, up from 125 in November but below last year's peak of 144 areas in June. . . .Yeah, but who wants to live in that frozen hell? If the current rate of "global warming" keeps up, the whole area will be under a glacier by 2015.
The lowest unemployment rates are in the upper plains states, with Fargo, N.D. reporting the nation's lowest rate, at 4 percent, followed by Grand Forks, N.D., and Lincoln, Neb., at 4.1 percent each.
The White House will propose eliminating the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. But where would we put nuclear waste? How about we send it to Gitmo? We wouldn't even have to move the terrorists first.Now that's funny, I don't care who y'are. OK, maybe not -- if you're a terrorist lovin', tree huggin', granola chomping, hippy throwback surrender monkey. Or a terrorist.
That is more than NeoCon George W. Bush spent on nukes during his final year in office. And this is what Obama said just five days ago in his State of the Union address:However, the associated Quadrennial Defense Review will drop the requirement to fight two major wars. Instead the emphasis will be on fighting a matrix of conventional, irregular and nuclear conflicts. The budget request includes a $600 million increase for nuclear weapons program to a total of about $7 billion.
Now, even as we prosecute two wars, we're also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people -- the threat of nuclear weapons. I've embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons and seeks a world without them. To reduce our stockpiles and launchers, while ensuring our deterrent, the United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades.One would think that a politician of Obama's visibility would let at least a few weeks go by before breaking a promise. Then again, why should he start now?
Oh yeah, that troublesome "jobless recovery". People without jobs make for a bad economy, "recovery" be damned. Let's check ShadowStats for the latest numbers:Consumer spending, which normally accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, has been held back by the worst labor market in a quarter century.
The two straight quarters of growth followed a record four quarters of decline. Still, the expansion in the fourth quarter was fueled by companies refilling depleted stockpiles, a trend that will eventually fade. . . .Must be why the NASDAQ dropped 1.45% and my personal investing portfolio (which almost always way outperforms the NASDAQ) dropped 1.34% last Friday. Yeah, the day that this "good news" came out.
Unlike past rebounds driven by the spending of ordinary shoppers, this one appears to hinge on spending by businesses, foreigners and — until it runs out — government stimulus.Of course, ABC tries to pooh-pooh the idea of a double-dip recession. Me? I'm watching my pennies because I can't afford the risk.
History suggests this isn't the recipe for a strong recovery. In the early 1980s, businesses led a recovery from recession. Their inventory building accounted for 74 percent of growth in the first.
But then the economy contracted. A drop in inventories was a key reason why. The economy fell into a second, more severe recession in 1981 and 1982. The unemployment rate hit 10.8 percent, the post-World War II high.
Is another "double-dip" recession likely now?
