Its got to bother Mitt Romney that Rick Perry polled better, as a write in than he did after campaigning there. Maybe, Mitt will take the hint and bow out like Pawlenty.
Perry’s strong Positive Intensity Score among Republicans who do know him — 23 percent for the July 25-Aug. 7 period — remains a strong plus for him. Perry’s score is slightly higher than the less well-known Herman Cain’s (22 percent) and the much better-known Rudy Giuliani’s (20 percent); it is also higher than Sarah Palin’s (18 percent), Bachmann’s (18 percent), and Romney’s (14 percent).
Five other candidates Gallup is tracking — Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich — continue to generate little enthusiasm among Republicans. All have Positive Intensity Scores in the single digits, anchored by Gingrich’s low score of 2.
And, in keeping with the numbers theme, Obama’s poll numbers continue their slide downward. Via Gallup.
In honor of Obama’s 39% approval a little SRV and Jeff Beck:
Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Energy today announced that Philips Lighting North America has won the 60-watt replacement bulb category of the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L Prize) competition. The Department of Energy’s L Prize challenged the lighting industry to develop high performance, energy-saving replacements for conventional light bulbs that will save American consumers and businesses money.
The DOE press release goes on to discuss the performance of Phillips new LED bulbs’ performance with respect to its lifetime hours, performance at temperature extremes, performance in humidity. One aspect the DOE’s press release does not cover is light quality. This is because the ‘harsh’ and slightly blueish light emitted from LED’s that are great for the piercing daytime running lights used on newer cars create unpleasing lighting in your living room.
The reason LED lighting in a home, or any interior application, is unpleasing is because LED light is monochromatic, meaning an LED only emits a narrow wavelength of light (color). Unlike a traditional incandescent bulb that emits a true white light (made up of the entire visible spectrum of light) a white LED is either a combination of red, green and blue LED’s or a blue LED coated with yellow phosphorus.
Did you know there is no such thing as a white LED chip? “White” LEDs (packaged devices) start with a blue LED chip, also referred to in the LED industry as a blue “pump”. Then a yellow-based phosphor is applied over the blue chip – refer back to Figure 1. This combination of colors makes use of a phenomenon known as metamerism which occurs when our eyes and brain perceive two different but complementary colors as “mixing” to “create” a third complementary color. When the blue light shines through the yellow phosphor it is down-converted into what we see as white light. Blue LED chip + yellow-based phosphor = white light.
This tricking of the eye into seeing white light creating the harshness and blueish tint of the light emitted from white LED’s. White light from incandescent bulbs don’t have this problem. I’ll let Bill Nye explain…
The DOE is handing out a $10 million prize to the electronics giant Phillips Co. for creating a light bulb consumers aren’t asking for and don’t want. And, when consumers do purchase them, they will be unhappy with the light provided.
One final point. If white LED’s can perform in an automotive application (vibration, environmental extremes, voltage fluctuations, humidity, life testing etc.) why is the DOE retesting the LED’s?
The winning Philips product excelled through rigorous short-term and long-term performance testing carried out by independent laboratories and field assessments conducted with utilities and other partners. The product also performed well through a series of stress tests, in which the product was subjected to extreme conditions such as high and low temperatures, humidity, vibration, high and low voltage, and various electrical waveform distortions. The Philips L Prize winning product was also required to have a useful lifetime of more than 25,000 hours, compared with 1,000 to 3,000 hours for the products these highly efficient bulbs are intended to replace.
“The Postal Service is facing dire economic challenges that threaten its very existence. . . . If the Postal Service was a private sector business, it would have filed for bankruptcy and utilized the reorganization process to restructure its labor agreements to reflect the new financial reality.”
The USPS says it needs to reduce its workforce by 120,000 career positions by 2015, in addition to the 100,000 it expects through regular attrition. Some of the 120,000 could come through buyouts and other programs, but a significant number likely would be the result of layoffs, if Congress allows the agency to circumvent union contracts.
A lay off at the USPS will never happen.
Obama will never allow the Postal Service lay off a single union employee. He will spring into action after his ‘much needed’ vacation and announce a bailout the USPS. He will use the excuse that the current size of the work force at the postal service is necessary to provide mail service to the people who depend on the post office and don’t have access to any other form of communication.
This is not Obama’s economy, it’s ours. It’s not his country, it’s ours. We own it folks and it’s going to take effort on our part to turn it around. Perhaps if we paid more attention when the seeds of housing crisis were planted back in the 1990s things would be much different today economically speaking. We are now seeing how destructive overregulation is to the business community.
At a cost easily exceeding $1 million, can someone tell me how Jill Biden’s visit to a refugee camp is helping address the problem? Wouldn’t it just make more sense to provide direct aid to the Somalis? Just sayin’…
He can’t spend time with his family in either of the beautiful, luxurious residences the taxpayers provide for him in Washington or Camp David? No, silly. His Royal Highness is entitled to mingle a while among his fellow elites on the Vineyard. “Family time” (a.k.a. golfing till you drop) goes down a lot easier there.
And just because he’ll be spending ten days in $50K/week digs doesn’t mean he won’t be with the little people in spirit. He can watch the stock market drop like a rock from the Vineyard just as well as he can from the White House.
Though much of the discussion about a possible fairness doctrine for broadcasters went away when Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2010, one Federal Communications Commissioner says there still could be an effort at finding a back door to the rules. Commissioner Robert McDowell told Chris Stirewalt on Monday’s Power Play Live that localism, a proposal that gives the federal government the ability to make sure broadcasters serve their communities, could also be used to wedge in principles of the fairness doctrine.
“The government would be compiling data as to what kind of content you were airing and whether the government thought that was appropriate content,” McDowell said
If you are wondering why a FCC Commissioner in Obama’s regime is warning about new attempts to implement the fairness doctrine, here is an interesting snippet from Robert McDowell’s bio:
Robert M. McDowell was first appointed to a seat on the Federal Communications Commission by President George W. Bush and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2006. When he was reappointed to the Commission on June 2, 2009, Commissioner McDowell became the first Republican to be appointed to an independent agency by President Barack Obama. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on June 25, 2009.
If he keeps talking like this, he will be blown out of the regime.
The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual.
The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.
The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.
It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a CIA ceremony celebrating the hero SEALs.
The prominence of the War on Terror in a political strategy document, however, heightened Democrat fears that Mr Bush will use the September 11 attacks and their aftermath as the backdrop to his re-election campaign. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Senator vying for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, said: “It continues to be shocking but it’s not surprising that this Administration will exploit the war on terrorism and national security issues for their advantage if they can.”
Democrats criticised Mr Bush for making Iraq an issue in last month’s congressional mid-term elections but failed to come up with a strategy to counter the President. Mr Bush, making national security his central issue, led Republicans to record-breaking victories in both the Senate and House of Representatives.
If this is all Obama can point to as a “success” in four years in office, have at it.
Let see… Harry Reid, Obama and rest of his legion of misfits on the left run up massive deficits from the failed stimulus to ObamaCare, enacted business strangling regulations and prevented the use of our own natural resources. All these actions have dragged our economy into the gutter.
Now, after all this, Harry Reid has the unmitigated gall to use the fact that the United States has lost its AAA credit rating (thanks in no small part to his support of economy killing legislation), as an excuse to call for higher taxes on the job creating private sector economy.
The action by S&P reaffirms the need for a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines spending cuts with revenue-raising measures like closing taxpayer-funded giveaways to billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners. This makes the work of the joint committee all the more important, and shows why leaders should appoint members who will approach the committee’s work with an open mind — instead of hardliners who have already ruled out the balanced approach that the markets and rating agencies like S&P are demanding.
Reid is so full of B.S. it is sickening. And, what is it with these guys and their hatred of private aviation?
S&P decided to lower the AAA rating, held by the United States for 70 years, to AA+ after a bipartisan debt deal signed into law this week failed to assuage concerns about the nation’s growing spending.
Analysts have said a downgrade could increase the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government and lead to tens of billions of dollars in more interest costs per year. That could translate into higher borrowing for consumers and businesses, too.
Well, once we had an easy ride and always felt the same
Time was on our side and I had everything to gain
Let it be like yesterday
Please let me have happy days
Won’t you tell me
Where have all the good times gone?
Where have all the good times gone?
At the outset it is important to note that as this operation moved from one of overseeing the selling and subsequent international transport of weapons, to one in which law enforcement was supposed to trace the guns back to cartel members and make arrests, its name changed from Gunrunner to “Fast and Furious.” Yet they are not so much two separate operations as they are two parts of one large covert action. Thus it’s not uncommon to hear people use the labels Gunrunner and Fast and Furious interchangeably.
The beginnings of Gunrunner can at least be traced back as far as Feb. 15, 2009, when President Obama authorized $10 million for it via the stimulus package. His signature on that document renders his subsequent denials of any knowledge of Gunrunner questionable at best. And on April 2, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech at the Mexico/United States Arms Trafficking Conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he boasted of overseeing the implementation of Gunrunner.
What is the real reason behind Project Gunrunner / Fast and Furious?
Gun Control
One of the worst remaining aspects of Gunrunner and Fast and Furious is that both appear to have been carried out with the intention of increasing border crime and chaos to levels sufficient to persuade Americans to embrace more gun control. If such a presumption seems like a stretch, then consider that to date, the Justice Department’s only response to the myriad Fast and Furious allegations has been to mandate a new law requiring gun stores in Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico to make a special report to the ATF when an individual makes multiple long-gun purchases over a five-day period, the only caveat being that the guns have to be greater than .22-caliber and capable of using a detachable clip.
Upon announcing these new gun control measures on July 11, 2011, Deputy Attorney General James Cole actually tried to justify them by pointing out that such weapons “are highly sought after by dangerous drug trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest border.” (No mention was made of the fact that hundreds upon hundreds of these same weapons were sold to would-be criminals with ATF and Justice Department approval during Gunrunner, then smuggled across the border.
Another reason it appears the passage of more gun control was the goal all along is found in e-mails between Mark Chait, ATF’s assistant director of field operations, and William Newell, special agent in charge in Phoenix during Fast and Furious. In one such e-mail, sent during July 2010, Chait asked Newell to pay special attention to multiple long-gun sales at gun stores because the ATF was, at that time, already “looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long-gun multiple sales.” (In other words, the requirement for a special form on multiple long-gun sales to law-abiding Americans was already in the works.)
In honor of Obama’s 39% approval a little SRV and Jeff Beck:
