Obama said that stemming the tide of foreclosures is key to turning around the recession-bound economy.
So a $75 billion “mortgage relief plan” is the key this thing? Then what was that 787-billion dollar thingamajig all about?
PS – I’m surprised that my spellchecker takes no offense to thingamajig.
I wonder if it will be long before Grandma Nancy will start using her age as an excuse for this kind of thing.
Still, she defended a stimulus provision that would require public infrastructure projects to use U.S. steel, a clause that has concerned some trading partners, even though it is largely unenforceable as written.
“We’re looking out for their interest as we look to grow the U.S. economy. I don’t think that’s protectionism. I think that’s what any country would do for its workers,” she said. “President Obama is not a protectionist president.”
Actually, Nancy, that is exactly protectionism. Maybe she just pulled a W. Or maybe the next thing you know, she’ll be telling the world that San Francisco is a great bastion of restrained heterosexual conservatism.
PS – In case you haven’t been following the dramatic stimulus bill like you follow your favorite soap operas sports entertainment shows, the stimulus repeals Clinton Era welfare reform [via TigerHawk].
I just saw an IBM commercial which claims that half of the power we generate disappears due to losses in the grid. Considering that transmission & distribution losses are about 7%, I have to wonder where that other 43% is going.
Suffice it to say that I think that a lot of companies who can get a lot of money from the government for grid upgrades are lying about how much those upgrades are needed.
He gets busted doing something stupid, and for some reason that I don’t understand he gets all kinds of sympathy for it. Example:
The people who want to write off the whole situation really piss me off. It isn’t that he smoked pot. It isn’t that he is stupid enough to hang around the University of South Carolina. It isn’t that he’s even stupider yet to get caught on camera. It’s that he gets paid millions to not have his picture taken with retards from USCe while smoking pot. IT’S HIS FUCKING JOB! Contrary to this image, Michael Phelps is not just a normal 23 year-old.
Moreover, it’s the sheriff’s job to investigate what appears to be a crime. People want the sheriff to focus on more important crimes. That’s great. I can understand the desire. However, when your job is to enforce the rules, you do yourself absolutely no favors by not bothering to enforce the rules when everyone knows that they were broken. If the sheriff doesn’t go after Michael Phelps and the others involved, he’ll spend the rest of his tenure hearing from everyone he arrests that they shouldn’t get in trouble because Michael Phelps didn’t get in trouble. It’s a slippery slope that quickly leads to having to kill someone to actually be considered a prosecutable wrongdoer.
I’m not talking about dead birds or collateral damage due to construction. I really wonder how wind turbines affect the environment.
First, let’s follow the thought process for using/burning hydrocarbons. They’re useful, available, relatively cheap. And no single use or user can ever produce enough carbon to cause problems. However there are billions of single users and the collective impact may lead to something problematic.
Returning to wind, we know that it’s useful, available, and slightly more expensive than fossil fuels, but relatively cheap to harness. No single turbine seems to be enough to modify the local climate. But what if you put a few hundred thousand in the midwest?
Well, some scientists, at least, are taking a look. Referring to a 2004 study,
Our results suggest that on a global scale the answer to this question is no. Unless the use of wind power grows so large that it supplies roughly as much power as the entire current global electric power system, the large-scale climatic effects of wind power will likely be negligible. It is plausible, however, that significant local climate change could occur in areas where wind farms are concentrated even if wind supplies a small fraction of global electricity demand.
A chance of significant climate change in the Midwest? Sounds promising.
