Obama has played more rounds of golf (32) in his first 14 months than George W. Bush did in his two terms (24).
"Just this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that it had tracked an explosion in extremist anti-government patriot groups fueled, in large part, by anger over the economy and Barack Obama's presidency," NBC's David Gregory said on "Meet the Press" in early April. "In this highly charged political atmosphere, where you've got so much passion, so much disagreement, this takes it, of course, to a different level."
How did this story line grow? Many of the claims that extremism is on the rise in America originate in research done by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based group that for nearly 40 years has tracked what it says is the growing threat of intolerance in the United States. These days the SPLC is issuing new warnings of new threats. But today's warnings sound an awful lot like those of the past.
In 1989, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of skinheads, saying, "Not since the height of Klan activity during the civil rights era has there been a white supremacist group so obsessed with violence. ..."
In 1992, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of other white supremacist groups, which it claimed had grown by 27 percent from the year before.
In 1995, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of right-wing militias.
In 1998, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of Internet-based hate groups, which according to one press account had "created the biggest surge in hate in America in years."
In 1999, the SPLC warned that the growing threat of Web-based hate groups was growing even more, with a 60 percent increase from the year before.
In 2002, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of post-Sept. 11 hate groups, which it said had grown 12 percent between 2000 and 2001.
In 2004, the SPLC warned (again) of the growing threat of skinhead groups, whose numbers it said had doubled in the previous year.
In 2008, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of hate groups overall, whose number it said increased 48 percent since 2000.
And in 2010, just a few weeks ago, the SPLC warned of the growing threat of "patriot" groups, which it said increased by 244 percent in 2009.
In the world of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the threat is always growing. Ronald Reagan's policies led to a growing threat. The first Gulf War led to a growing threat. The election of Bill Clinton led to a growing threat. The Internet led to a growing threat. Sept. 11 led to a growing threat. The war in Iraq led to a growing threat. Is it any wonder that Obama's presidency has, in the SPLC's estimation, led to a growing threat?
If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
In the past several days, several major corporations have announced substantial writedowns in response to the new health care law. These include Deere & Co. ($150 million), Caterpillar ($100 million), AK Steel Holding ($31 million), and 3M ($85–90 million). Yesterday, AT&T joined the list, announcing it would take a $1 billion charge against future earnings. A CreditSuisse analyst cited in both stories estimated the total first-quarter hit to S&P 500 firms will be $4.5 billion.
The writedowns are in response to the loss of a tax-free subsidy for providing prescription drug coverage to retirees. Several years ago, Congress decided it was better to induce corporations to provide prescription drug coverage for retirees than to have the costs paid by Medicare, so it enacted a tax-free subsidy, while still allowing companies to take a tax deduction for the coverage . Under the health care reforms Congress just enacted, however, the deduction will be eliminated in 2013.
Why are the companies announcing these changes? And why now if the tax change does not take effect until 2013? Because failure to do so could get the companies in trouble with the SEC. Under standard accounting rules, companies are supposed to take the charge in the quarter in which the tax law change is enacted, not when it takes effect. Because the first quarter ends Wednesday, more writedown announcements may be forthcoming.
The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions [that the bill will increase costs and will likely result in these companies terminating their employee health care plans]are a matter of concern.
Take a medium-sized firm that employs a hundred people earning $40,000 each—a private security firm based in Atlanta, say—and currently offers them health-care insurance worth $10,000 a year, of which the employees pay $2,500. This employer’s annual health-care costs are $750,000 (a hundred times $7,500). In the reformed system, the firm’s workers, if they didn’t have insurance, would be eligible for generous subsidies to buy private insurance. For example, a married forty-year-old security guard whose wife stayed home to raise two kids could enroll in a non-group plan for less than $1,400 a year, according to the Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator. (The subsidy from the government would be $8,058.)
In a situation like this, the firm has a strong financial incentive to junk its group coverage and dump its workers onto the taxpayer-subsidized plan. Under the new law, firms with more than fifty workers that don’t offer coverage would have to pay an annual fine of $2,000 for every worker they employ, excepting the first thirty. In this case, the security firm would incur a fine of $140,000 (seventy times two), but it would save $610,000 a year on health-care costs. If you owned this firm, what would you do? Unless you are unusually public spirited, you would take advantage of the free money that the government is giving out. Since your employees would see their own health-care contributions fall by more than $1,100 a year, or almost half, they would be unlikely to complain. And even if they did, you would be saving so much money you afford to buy their agreement with a pay raise of, say, $2,000 a year, and still come out well ahead.
By 2019, it says, the bills passed by the House and Senate will have cut the number of uninsured Americans by thirty-two million, raised the percentage of people with some form of health-care coverage from eighty-three per cent to ninety-four per cent, and reduced the federal deficit by a cumulative $143 billion. If all of these predictions turn out to be accurate, ObamaCare will go down as one of the most successful and least costly government initiatives in history. At no net cost to the taxpayer, it will have filled a gaping hole in the social safety net and solved a problem that has frustrated policymakers for decades.
According to the C.B.O., between now and 2019 the net cost of insuring new enrollees in Medicaid and private insurance plans will be $788 billion, but other provisions in the legislation will generate revenues and cost savings of $933 billion. Subtract the first figure from the second and—voila!—you get $143 billion in deficit reduction.
The C.B.O. counts as revenues more than $50 million in Social Security taxes and $70 billion in payments towards a new home-care program, which will eventually prove very costly, and it doesn’t count some $50 billion in discretionary spending. After excluding these pieces of trickery and the questionable Medicare cuts, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the C.B.O., has calculated that the reform will actually raise the deficit by $562 billion in the first ten years. “The budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed,” he wrote in the Times. “So fantasy in, fantasy out.”
As far back as 1999, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Controlled Biological Systems Program funded a bee-training program to detect buried landmines, so that many thousands of acres of the world’s land could be productively farmed without encountering landmines the ugly way.
A bee’s natural instinct is to extend its proboscis when it encounters a desirable odor, anticipating the taste of a flower, let’s say. But the bees used in the 1999 DARPA experiment were trained, via classical Pavlovian conditioning, to respond to the odor of TNT instead. Their reward when they responded with a Proboscis Extension Reflex (PER), was a taste of sweet syrup. Then, trainers attached small diodes onto the backs of TNT-trained bees and used handheld radar tracking devices to chart where the bees went.
In 2010, bee training in the fields of defense and security, medicine, food, and building industries is big business. Bee training is essentially the same as it was in 1999, but the results are attained with more sophisticated and less expensive technology.
1. Picture yourself lying on your belly on a warm rock that hangs out over a crystal clear stream.
2. Picture yourself with both your hands dangling in the cool running water.
3. Birds are sweetly singing in the cool mountain air, and you feel the warmth of the sun throughout your body.
4. No one knows your secret place.
5. You are in total seclusion from that hectic place called the world.
6. The soothing sound of a gentle water fall fills the air with a cascade of serenity..
7. The water is so crystal clear that you can easily make out the face of Nancy Pelosi, the person you are holding underwater.
It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses.
Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments -- a constitutional gimmick that allows a president to appoint someone when Congress is in recess to a job that normally requires Senate approval. The appointee serves until the next round of Congressional elections.
This end run around Senate confirmation was built into the Constitution to allow the president to quickly fill vacancies that came up when lawmakers were out of town, to keep the government running smoothly in times when travelers and mail moved by horseback and Congress met part time.
Modern presidents have employed this power to place nominees who ran into political trouble in the Senate. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office.
In some cases, Mr. Bush has used the recess appointment power to rescue egregiously bad selections that would never pass muster on grounds of experience and competence. (Remember last year's recess appointment of the undiplomatic and Congressionally unacceptable John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.) In other cases, he has merely sought to avoid logjams that the White House created for itself by refusing to accommodate reasonable Democratic requests for information, documents and consultation.
It turns out there really is growing inequality in America. It’s the 45% premium in pay and benefits that government workers receive over the poor saps who create wealth in the private economy. And the gap is growing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), from 1998 to 2008 public employee compensation grew by 28.6%, compared with 19.3% for private workers. In the recession year of 2009, with almost no inflation and record budget deficits, more than half the states awarded pay raises to their employees. Even as deficits in state capitals widen and are forcing cuts in services, few politicians are willing to eliminate these pay inequities.
What if government workers earned the average of what private workers earn? States and localities would save $339 billion a year from their more than $2.1 trillion budgets. These savings are larger than the combined estimated deficits for 2010 and 2011 of every state in America. In a separate survey, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis compares the compensation of public versus private workers in each of the 50 states. Perhaps not coincidentally, the pay gap is widest in states that have the biggest budget deficits, such as New Jersey, Nevada and Hawaii. Of the 40 states that have a budget deficit so far this year, 28 would have a balanced budget were it not for the windfall to government workers.”
LOS ANGELES (March 24) — A shoplifting case that began with a televised confession on the “Dr. Phil” show led a San Diego judge Monday to condemn TV personality Phil McGraw as “a terrible, terrible man” and “a charlatan.”
District Court Judge Irma Gonzalez unloaded on Dr. Phil as she sentenced a couple to prison for running a $100,000 shoplifting ring in which they used their three young children as decoys, and sold the stolen merchandise through Web sites. The couple discussed their exploits on a “Dr. Phil” episode, “Shoplifting Confessions,” in November 2008.
The Eatons went on the TV show to get help ending their compulsion to shoplift, but show officials pressed them to exaggerate their exploits, their lawyer told the court, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. The couple brought along a home video of one of their trips, using the children to distract store clerks, and seemed more interested in bragging than in getting help giving up their livelihood, according to earlier reports.
“What a charlatan this man is,” the judge was quoted as saying during the sentencing. “What a terrible, terrible man.”
The Government Accountability Office Punk'd Energy Star recently by submitting fake products and companies for certification. The Environmental Protection Agency's arbiters of efficiency standards rubber-stamped 15 out of 20 bogus products and a handful of fake firms became Energy Star Partners. Here are three of our favorite fabrications.
1. Tropical Thunder Appliances
To perform this investigation, the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) March 26, 2010, report states that it "used four bogus manufacturing firms and fictitious individuals to apply for Energy Star partnership." All four qualified. In fact, two of the fake firms received requests for real companies to buy their Energy Star–certified products—none of which exist.
Dummy websites emblazoned with Energy Star Partnerships remain online for each of the four front companies—Cool Rapport (HVAC equipment), Futurizon Solar Innovations (lighting), Spartan Digital Electronics, and Tropical Thunder Appliances.
2. The Feather-Duster Fly-Strip Air Freshener
Ostensibly an indoor air purifier, this item is actually a standard space heater spangled in strips of flypaper, with a feather duster perched up top.
The product was submitted without a standard safety file number from the Underwriters' Laboratories. Plus, the product's website did not include a disclaimer required for Energy Star certification. Last but not least, the garish photo submitted with the product's application portrays what is clearly a feather duster rigged to space heater. Nevertheless, these obstacles proved surmountable—the product was approved in 11 days and became listed on the Energy Star website.
Other great moments in rapid confirmation occurred for submissions of a nonexistent water cooler (approved in four days), a make-believe commercial HVAC unit (approved in one week), a bogus boiler qualified within one business day of submission and a dishwasher that also made the cut in a single day. But the record-setting Usain Bolt of fake Energy Star products has to be an imaginary computer monitor—the EPA requested expedited info so the machine could make a deadline for a Qualified Products list designed to guide shoppers during the 2009 holiday season. The GAO rapidly fired off some falsified test data, and the made-up monitor was approved and online within 30 minutes of submission.
3. The Gasoline-Powered Alarm Clock
On the application for Energy Star certification, this product's description stated that "the item is the size of a small generator and is powered by gasoline." The GAO never devised an image of this piece of nonexistent indoor power equipment, which would presumably make enough noise to temporarily wake consumers before carbon monoxide fumes sent them back to sleep for good. The dimensions are listed as 18 inches tall, 15 inches wide and 10 inches in depth. "Gas-powered clock radio is sleek, durable, easy on your electric bill, and surprisingly quiet," the product's marketing description states.
Approved!
The notion of being easy on the electric bill appears in the description of fake (approved) items that were less patently absurd than this one. The EPA didn't bat an eye at a geothermal heat pump that claimed to be fully 20 percent more efficient than qualified products at the top of the category. This gets to the heart of a prior critique of Energy Star—that manufacturers submit their own efficiency data, which isn't subject to independent verification. In the instance of a bogus dehumidifier granted certification (an appliance also billed as 20 percent more efficient than the category leader), the EPA did request an e-mail confirmation on the bogus test data. To get the Energy Star stamp, the GAO spies simply had to stick to the story.
Last week CTU headquarters was blown up by a bomb hidden in a car driven by Generic Islamic Republic President Sham's daughter Kayla, who was guided straight from the terrorist hideout to the CTU entrance tunnel by the crack CTU team. That's right: The agency responsible for protecting the nation from terrorism, through its own cluelessness, managed to get itself incapacitated by a terrorist bomb.
So now, with CTU even more dysfunctional than usual, there is nobody to stop the terrorists from bringing the Lethal Atomic Rods of Doom into Manhattan except our boy Jack Bauer, who has fully recovered from being stabbed in the stomach by his girlfriend Renee three hours ago and is now, we hope, going to swing into action, by which we mean something more than shouting into the phone.
Speaking of the terrorists: Kayla's boyfriend Tarin is apparently still one of them, since he set Kayla up to be disintegrated, although she managed to get out of the car just in time, so maybe they will still have Feelings for each other.
In subplot action:
Bill Prady, the world's most diligent parole officer, is hanging around asking Dana pesky questions about her ex-boyfriend Kevin. We have no idea where this subplot is going, but it refuses to go away, so we're starting to wonder if maybe Agent Walsh is a mole, seeing as how CTU is required by law to always have one on the payroll.
Edgar is still dead.
UPDATE: The terrorists set off a Dramatically Sparking Wires Bomb.
UPDATE: "Agent Skaggs?"
UPDATE: Phil can shut down all bridge and tunnel traffic into the city. Phil has that power.
UPDATE: Those terrorists are some BAD shots.
UPDATE: I love when they tell where the bad guys are using the o'clock system.
UPDATE: That guy is SO clearly fake that only a moron, or Hastings, would believe him.
UPDATE: Unless I am wrong.
UPDATE: This here is some really bad acting.
UPDATE: Check out Jack's tasteful bachelor apartment!
UPDATE: YES! CHLOE!
UPDATE: The lesson: Never get between a woman and her trunk line.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Jack and the terrorists are setting a world record for Most Missed Shots.
UPDATE: It's a good thing everybody thought to bring along 67 million bullets.
UPDATE: Chloe has taken precautions.
UPDATE: Hastings does not appear surprised that a probation officer from Arkansas would appear at CTU headquarters at 5 a.m. during a terrorist attack.
UPDATE: Jack is hit! But it's only a bullet wound. He will be fine. This is the shootingest episode EVER. But it does lead one to ask how come Renee could find Jack in, what, 11 minutes, while CTU had to wait for Chloe to get into the trunk line.
UPDATE: Agent Walsh is definitely not following normal agent procedures.
UPDATE: Well knock us down with a feather. Agent Walsh IS a mole.
UPDATE: Next week: Jack is fine!
Jobless hairdresser Patrick Baecker, 35, posed as a mystic healer and told Axel Pfeffer he would make him see for £20,000.
The court in Fehmarn, Germany, heard how the former motorcyclist had tried everything to restore his sight after losing it in a crash.
But instead Baecker fed him pickles laced with powerful mind-bending hallucinogenic drugs to induce visions.
‘You are a hairdresser, not a shaman,’ Judge Markus Faerber told Baecker in court.
MALMO, Sweden, March 25 (UPI) -- The warden of a Swedish jail said a prisoner received an official warning for voicing his discontent toward his situation via flatulence.
Anders Eriksson, warden of the Kirseberg prison in Malmo, said guards filed numerous complaints against the 21-year-old prisoner, who was not named, alleging "a series of concerted attacks" in the form of the prisoner's constant wind-breaking, Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday.
"I have worked within the prisons and probation service since 1986 and I have never experienced a situation where behavior of this sort has led to punishment," Eriksson said in an interview with Sweden's Metro newspaper.
Prison authorities said the prisoner revealed the motive for his flatulence.
"I had an upset stomach while I was playing cards but did not want to fart there. So I went over to the guards instead," he was quoted as saying.
The prisoner was issued an official warning and could face punishment for any future attacks of intentional flatulence, Eriksson said.
I am number 24! Excellent! And Will Akers keeps stealing my pencil!
I think this might be my year!
Joe Biden is not as stupid as he seems!.
I know what's going to happen next on LOST. Unfortunately I'll be out of the office for several weeks....
[There is a] difference between trying hard to honestly think through tough social problems because you care and mouthing comfortable pieties in an effort to get credit for caring.
However "imperfect" this bill is, you got what you wanted: virtually all the uninsured are covered, and those who aren't covered probably aren't particularly unhealthy. So now you should be willing to state that all the marvelous things you claimed would come to pass, will actually come to pass. Over a reasonable time frame. You cannot tell me that we will save hundreds of thousands of lives over a fifty or sixty year time frame. I mean, you can, but then I don't take you seriously. That's a few of thousand lives a year, far lower than the number of American lives claimed annually by "non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin"--at a cost of $200 billion a year, or $70-100 million per life saved. I know, every life is priceless, but US policy cannot actually be operated as if this were true. Moreover, when you stretch out the time frame this way, your theory is non-falsifiable: a few thousand lives a year is too small to be distinguished from statistical noise.
To me, that just won't do. Americans were not told that American households would be 1% less worried about bankruptcy, or that we'd save a hundred thousand lives over thirty years. They were regaled with eye-popping statistics on deaths from lack of health insurance--I certainly was, by many of the very same commenters who are now suddenly wary of prediction making. If you quoted those statistics, you were committing to a pretty strong position on the benefits of this bill. By my count, since we're now supposed to be covering at least 2/3 of those who are currently uninsured, and the remainder are often immigrants who trend younger than the general population, you believe that we should see a reduction of at least 15,000 deaths a year. You might argue me down to 12,000, but you couldn't get me as low as ten. That is what is implied by citing a figure of 20,000 deaths a year.
If you quoted Himmelstein et al's 45,000, obviously you should be expecting deaths to fall by at least 25,000 a year, very conservatively. If we don't see such improvements, then those studies were wrong. And if you won't commit to saying that you expect such a sizable reduction in our mortality rate, then you were wrong to cite them.
I mean, maybe we say that there are a bunch of combo benefits: we reduce bankruptcies by a third, save five thousand lives a year, get some harder-to-measure morbidity benefits, and so on. But there have to be some measurable benefits. If this helps families stave off financial ruin, we should see a meaningful and sustained reduction in the number of bankruptcies. If it improves health, that should show up in life expectancy. If it doesn't, then the bill doesn't do what you said you expected it to do. That's valuable information! Not so much about you, as about health care bills.
In standard orbit around an iron-silica-type uncharted planet, the USS Enterprise prepares to complete its survey, when everything within sensor range suddenly "blinks", almost as if the universe is on the verge of ceasing to exist. And, in the wake of this, a man appears on the surface of the planet, where moments earlier there was no life.
Beaming down, Captain Kirk, Spock, and the landing party encounter a man. Dirty, and disheveled, he falls from a rock. The landing party returns to the Enterprise with him, where Kirk learns more news – the strange phenomena drained the dilithium crystals almost completely. Still worse, Starfleet issues a Code Factor 1 message – invasion status. The effect experienced by the Enterprise was also experienced everywhere in the galaxy, and far beyond. Starfleet withdraws all nearby ships – Kirk and Enterprise are the bait.
Kirk talks to his "guest" – a man named Lazarus, who is pursuing a "thing", a monster who destroyed his entire civilization. Beaming down, Kirk learns from Spock that there is no other creature here. Accusing Lazarus of lying, Kirk demands the truth – and the universe turns inside out. The same "winking" phenomenon occurs again. And Lazarus... first he has a bandaged forehead, and then he doesn't, and then he does again.
Meanwhile, Spock has discovered a source of radiation that is not there – a "rip" in the universe, where regular physical laws do not apply. The key to locating this source seems to be the dilithium crystals – a revelation which excites Lazarus, who demands the impossible: that Kirk give him the crystals.
The captain refuses, but Lazarus overpowers two engineering officers and steals two crystals, nevertheless.
Kirk confronts him, but he denies it, blaming his monster. And the evidence suggests he isn't the thief, for the crystals are not aboard his ship. Back aboard the Enterprise, Kirk confronts Lazarus with his lies, and learns that Lazarus distorted a fact: he is a time traveler. The dead world Enterprise orbits is the distant future of his destroyed homeworld; the place and time he has traveled to in pursuit of the monster.
Speculating, Kirk and Spock conclude that the strange energy must come from a source outside the universe. A source in another universe. There are two copies of Lazarus, and they are periodically exchanging places through a kind of door – and if they ever exist in the same universe at the same time, everything, everywhere, will be annihilated in a cataclysmic matter/antimatter explosion.
Meanwhile, the alternative Lazarus steal the ship's energy crystals, then beams down. Kirk pursues. As he attempts to enter Lazarus' spaceship, he vanishes, hurled through the corridor into the other universe.
Once there, he meets the other Lazarus, the sane Lazarus, and learns the truth. Anti-Lazarus' people discovered how to pass through the negative magnetic corridor that both connects and protects the two universes. When this happened, Lazarus couldn't bear the knowledge that he had a duplicate, and resolved to destroy his other. He is mad and doesn't care if this causes the death of two universes. Anti-Lazarus and Kirk realize he must be stopped: if Kirk can force Lazarus into the corridor, Anti-Lazarus can hold him there, and Kirk can destroy his spaceship – which will also destroy Anti-Lazarus' spaceship. Access to the corridor will be sealed forever, and both universes will be safe. And two men named Lazarus will be at each others' throats for the remainder of eternity. Kirk goes back through the corridor and in a hand to hand combat throws Lazarus into the corridor. Back on board Kirk orders the Enterprise to fire phasers at the time ship which then disappears in both universes; both Lazarus are trapped forever in the corridor and both universes are saved.
