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2010
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August
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- The Last Hurrah...???
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, August 31, 2010
- The Man is an A--hole... (And that's all there is ...
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 30, 2010
- Restoring Honor - August 28, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, August 27, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, August 26, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, August 25, 2010
- Is Hamas a Terrorist Organization?
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, August 24, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 23, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, August 19, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, August 17, 2010
- So... when's the last time you got new tires?
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 16, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., August 14 & 15, 2010
- Harold Curtis VanDemark
- Barker's Newsbites: August 13, 2010
- Vernon Baker
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, August 12, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, August 11, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, August 10. 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 9. 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., August 7 & 8, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, August 6, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, August 5, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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August
(27)
About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
9 comments:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/08/09/smart.grid/index.html?hpt=C1
Experts on the nation's electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers.
During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124% - up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995 to 92 blackouts between 2001 and 2005 - according to research at the University of Minnesota.
In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.
"It's hard to imagine how anyone could believe that - in the United States - we should learn to cope with blackouts," said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.
* MY FRIENDS... AMERICA IS IN DECLINE.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704388504575419280283794598.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Friday's grim labor report is the latest confirmation that our economy is not recovering. A loss of 131,000 jobs and a stagnant 9.5% unemployment rate are bad enough. But a deeper look - at the little-known civilian employment-population ratio - shows [just how screwed we are.]
In contrast to the better-known unemployment rate, which measures the percentage of working-age Americans who are actively seeking jobs but do not have one, the civilian employment-population ratio measures the percentage of working-age Americans who have a job, whether they are seeking one or not.
This distinction matters because the state of an economy affects whether someone looks for a job at all.
Bad times discourage potential workers from seeking jobs...
When the economy was at its Bush-era height, in 2007, a little over 63% of adult Americans had jobs.
Friday's report shows that only about 58.4% do [now], a decline of nearly five percentage points.
While the unemployment rate remains steady at 9.5%, the employment-population ratio continues to fall each month. In April it was 58.8%, in May 58.7%, and in June 58.5%. [T]his decrease means that we have nearly 12 million fewer jobs today than we would have if the employment-population rate were still at its 2007 level of 63%.
No other recession in the past 60 years saw such rapid job destruction in either absolute or percentage terms. In the 1979-82 recession, unemployment topped out at a higher rate, 10.8%, but the employment-population ratio declined by only three percentage points, to 57% from 60%.
There is only one instance since World War II of the U.S economy increasing the employment-population ratio by five percentage points in a decade: the recovery that followed Ronald Reagan's tax cuts in 1983.
* AND SINCE THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS BASICALLY DOING THE REVERSE OF EVERYTHING REAGAN DID...
(*FROWN*) (*SHRUG*)
* WE'RE SCREWED...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e4caae36-a0b7-11df-badd-00144feabdc0.html
* HEY, FOLKS... REMEMBER THE BILLIONS WE'VE GIVEN GENERAL MOTORS? WELL... HERE'S HOW THEY'RE SAYING "THANK YOU!"
General Motors raised the bar for manufacturers seeking ways to tempt recession-hit consumers back into showrooms when it became the first carmaker to offer a “lifetime warranty” on all its new Opel and Vauxhall cars in Europe.
The US carmaker said the warranty would apply to the first owner of any of its German and UK marques registered from this month, and remain valid through the life of a car until it has registered 100,000 miles.
* NICE, HUH...! HEY... WHERE'S OUR U.S. TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZED "LIFETIME WARRANTIES" ON GM VEHICLES SOLD HERE IN THE UNITED STATES, PURCHASED BY THE SAME AMERICAN TAXPAYERS WHO BAILED GM OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE....???
GM said on Thursday it was making the warranty offer as a “strong statement of confidence” in the quality of its cars. “We are talking about a lifelong guarantee,” said Nick Reilly, GM Europe’s president.
* HMM... SO WHAT'S THIS SAY ABOUT GM's CONFIDENCE - OR LACK THEREOF - IN THEIR AMERICAN CARS... THE CARS THEY SELL HERE IN AMERICA TO AMERICANS...???
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afedpay10_ST_N.htm
At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
* REGULAR NEWSBITES READERS ARE WELL AWARE OF THIS FACT.
Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.
The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.
* WE'RE A NATION OF SCHMUCKS.
(*SIGH*)
Last week, President Obama ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees. For the rest of the 2-million-person federal workforce, Obama asked for a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike in 2011, the smallest in more than a decade. Federal workers also would qualify for seniority pay hikes.
Congressional Republicans want to cancel the across-the-board increase in 2011, which would save $2.2 billion.
* I'M WITH THE REPUBLICANS!
Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government's contribution to pensions. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/08/10/morning-bell-under-obamanomics-government-workers-win-you-lose/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Today [Nancy Pelosi's] House of Representatives is expected to approve yet another bailout for those states that have proved incapable of controlling their spending on government worker pay, benefits and pensions.
The $26.1 billion price tag will be funded in part by $11 billion in tax hikes on U.S. companies that compete internationally.
From his trillion dollar economic stimulus to his $3 trillion tax hike it has become clear that President Barack Obama views the private sector the same way the Huns viewed a city - as something to be sacked and plundered for the benefit of public sector workers.
(*GUFFAW*)
The effect of President Obama’s policies is becoming clear. The Wall Street Journal reports that personal incomes fell across the U.S. last year except in areas with a high concentration of federal government jobs. (Washington D.C. was one of just three metro areas that saw both net earnings and personal income rise.) (And those gains were due entirely to the growth of the federal government; private sector compensation in the Washington metropolitan area actually fell.)
(*HEADACHE*)
Nationally, private wages fell 6% in 2009 while government pay rose 2.6%.
* AIN'T THE AGE OF OBAMA, PELOSI, AND REID SIMPLY GRAND...?!?!
[S]ince the start of this recession in December 2007, private sector employment has fallen by 6.8% while federal government employment has actually increased by 10%. (Even after factoring in state and local government job losses, governments, on net, have added 64,000 jobs during this recession while the private sector has lost 7.8 million jobs.)
(*FEELING SICK TO MY STOMACH*)
Also according to USA Today, while President Obama may have ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees last week, he also requested a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike for the other 2 million federal workers who are also eligible for additional seniority pay hikes.
At 9.5% unemployment, every private sector worker must be worried about their job under the Obama regime. But not government workers. President Obama will always have a bailout ready to protect their jobs.
http://www.aei.org/outlook/100980
In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week; his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week.
Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.
[S]tudents invested far less time studying in the 2000s than they did in 1961. The evidence indicates not only that college students are studying less than they used to, but also that the vast majority of the time they once devoted to studying is now being allocated to leisure activities, rather than paid work.
Postsecondary institutions in the United States are falling short of their self-stated standard for academic time investment, and the amount they fall short by has quadrupled over time. We submit that if academic effort is, in fact, a crucial input to the production of knowledge, and eliciting such effort is an important part of the university's mission, then this widespread deterioration of the standard for student effort demands attention and considered action from all who have a stake in the quality of higher education in the United States.
* AGAIN, FOLKS... (AND, YEAH, I KNOW I SOUND LIKE A BROKEN RECORD)... AMERICA IS IN DECLINE.
http://www.house.gov/htbin/blog_inc?BLOG,tx14_paul,blog,999,All,Item%20not%20found,ID=100809_3729,TEMPLATE=postingdetail.shtml
* BY CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL (R-TX) --
Last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on the effect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that confirmed what critics of our foreign policy have been saying for years: The killing of civilians, although unintentional, angers other civilians and prompts them to seek revenge.
* DUH!
The Central Intelligence Agency has long acknowledged and analyzed the concept of blowback in our foreign policy.
(*NOD*)
It still amazes me that so many think that attacks against our soldiers [in] hostile foreign lands are motivated by hatred toward our system of government at home or by the religion of the attackers. In fact, most of the anger towards us is rooted in reactions towards seeing their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and other loved ones being killed by a foreign army. No matter our intentions, the violence of our militarism in foreign lands causes those residents to seek revenge if innocents are killed. One does not have to be Muslim to react this way, just human.
(*NOD*)
According to Former General Stanley McChrystal’s so-called insurgent math, for every insurgent killed, ten more insurgents are created by the collateral damage to civilians.
Every coalition attack leads to six retaliatory attacks against our troops within the following six weeks, according to the NBER report.
These retaliatory attacks must then be acted on by our troops, leading to still more attacks, and so it goes. Violence begets more violence. Eventually more and more Afghanis will view American troops with hostility and seek revenge for the death of a loved one. Meanwhile, we are bleeding ourselves dry, militarily and economically.
(*SIGH*) (*NOD*)
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/08/09/morning-bell-blaming-bush-doesnt-create-jobs/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Since becoming Speaker [of the House] in 2007, [Nancy] Pelosi has embarked on an unprecedented deficit spending spree, including a $700 billion financial bailout, a first $186 billion stimulus, a second trillion dollar stimulus, a $1.5 trillion health care expansion, a $447 billion omnibus spending bill and a $15 billion doc fix/Medicaid bailout.
All told, since [Democrats took control of the House and] Speaker Pelosi first took the gavel, discretionary spending has jumped 25%.
Since Pelosi became speaker in 2007 the nation’s unemployment rate has risen from 4.6% to a high of 10.2%, to today’s 9.5%.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100810/D9HGQB8O0.html
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin climbed into a firefighting plane Tuesday and dumped water on two of the hundreds of wildfires sweeping through western Russia and cloaking Moscow in a suffocating smog.
Putin has been a very visible leader in the battle against the fires, which have caused billions of dollars in damage and left thousands homeless in the past two weeks. He has demanded that soldiers help overstretched firefighting brigades and has walked through smoldering villages, consoling residents and promising them new homes by fall.
* WHY CAN'T OUR COMMIE PRESIDENT BE MORE LIKE THEIR COMMIE PRESIDENT...
(*HUGE FRIGG'N GRIN*)
(*CHUCKLE*)
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