A Russian military satellite nearly collided with a Korean weather satellite earlier this week.
The new civility from the left: Death threats on Twitter against Scott Walker and the Republicans who support him.
More civility from the left:
Senate Republicans were harried by swarming crowds. “We tried to get out of the building after the vote, because they were rushing the chamber, and we were escorted by security through a tunnel system to another building. But, after being tipped off by a Democrat, they mobbed the exit at that building, and were literally trying to break the windows of the cars we were in as we were driving away,” Republican senator Randy Hopper tells NRO. Such tactics, he sighs, were hardly unexpected. “I got a phone call yesterday saying that we should be executed. I’ve had messages saying that they want to beat me with a billy club.”
The new civility from the left: The Wisconsin Republicans who voted on limiting union collective bargaining have all received a detailed death threat.
We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head.
Read the whole thing. It is quite horrible.
The new civility in Wisconsin: “No one is safe.” In fact, better to read the rest of the quote:
No one is safe. Protesters have broken down doors, broken windows, Democrats are helping them into the building and they’re building momentum. They’re robo-calling like crazy, trying to pack as many people into the capitol so the Assembly can’t vote today. Right now there’s no way the Assembly can vote…we can’t secure the Assembly and we can’t protect our legislators. [emphasis mine]
I don’t seem to remember the tea party protesters doing this kind of stuff when Obamacare was being voted on.
The left’s war on democracy in Wisconsin. Key quote:
Let’s call this what it is: a campaign to nullify the 2010 election, by a sore-loser party that doesn’t like the results.
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupts.
Earlier this week NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center published its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle. As I do every month, I’ve posted the newest graph below, showing the continuing slow rise in sunspots (blue/black lines) in comparison with the consensis prediction made by the solar science community in May 2009 (red line).
» Read more
An update on Wisconsin: Legislature passes union bargaining restrictions, violent protests break out. This quote from Walker is interesting:
This afternoon, following a week and a half of line-by-line negotiation, [Democrat] Sen. Miller sent me a letter that offered three options: 1) keep collective bargaining as is with no changes, 2) take our counter-offer, which would keep collective bargaining as is with no changes, 3) or stop talking altogether.
With that letter, I realized that we’re dealing with someone who is stalling indefinitely, and doesn’t have a plan or an intention to return. His idea of compromise is “give me everything I want,” and the only negotiating he’s doing is through the media.
Enough is enough.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have taken new images of the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis in an effort to refine their understanding of its orbital path.
An evening pause:I had played this video as an evening pause back in November, when I thought the last mission of the space shuttle Discovery would be launched. Now that it has finally landed, completing its final mission, I think worthwhile to once again go back in time and watch a film of the shuttle’s maiden flight, launched August 30, 1984, narrated by the astronauts themselves. Note that the female astronaut on this flight is Judith Resnik, who died a little over a year and a half later in the Challenger accident.
O’Keefe says he has more NPR videos to release.
“But stay tuned, and you’ll see,” he told Newsmax. “I want to see if NPR tells the truth about what is going on. I want to see how they tell the truth, and then we’re going to release more information. So we’ll see what happens.”
Then there is this tidbit from NPR’s ombudsman, answering questions online for the Washington Post:
Who blabs to total strangers in public about their personal biases? Who doesn’t vet a prospective donor before meeting. PBS got the same offer and turned it down. [emphasis mine]
Given time, we are going to find out if PBS is lying or not, as we found out with ACORN when they repeatedly claimed they did not cooperate with O’Keefe’s pimp and prostitute and then had to retract those claims when O’Keefe released additional videos showing ACORN employees behaving illegally.
More here on the PBS sting.
Got a few hundred thousand you can spare? Why not build a doomsday bomb shelter?
It’s not the crime it’s the cover-up: According to Science, Michael Mann of the climategate scandal did not advocate the illegal deletion of emails that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as reported earlier by the Daily Caller. All he did was forward an email by Phil Jones, also part of the climategate scandal, that requested that emails should be deleted. He is therefore innocent.
This is getting absurd. That a journal like Science would try to justify this idiotic argument puts a serious stain on almost everything they publish. Michael Mann was requested by Phil Jones to contact Eugene Wahl and ask him to delete emails illegally. Mann took the easiest approach, and simply forwarded Jones’s email. Without question he was complicit in this illegal act.
If the scientific community doesn’t wake up soon and honestly deal with this scandal, they are going to destroy a four hundred year track record of honesty. Worse, they are going to find it increasingly difficult to get funds from anyone for their research.
A mature galaxy cluster has been found by astronomers at a time when the universe is thought to be only a quarter of its present age.
This discovery could be very significant, since astronomers think mature galaxy clusters need time to form, and shouldn’t exist in the early universe. “If further observations find many more [of these clusters] then this may mean that our understanding of the early Universe needs to be revised.”
Surprise: the new NPR interim CEO is a Democratic political contributor.
The squeals keep coming: Tiny cuts, big complaints.
Discovery has landed safely, for the last time.
A tea party victory: Republican Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) has reversed course and now supports the House Republican spending cuts.
I don’t think this will save them: NPR fires its CEO Vivian Schiller.
Repeal this idiotic bill! Now the Obama administration has given the entire state of Maine a waiver from Obamacare.
NASA scientists have published a paper warning that there is growing evidence that the melting at the polar caps is accelerating. From the press release:
The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the 2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than that of the ice sheets.
Several things to note after reading the actual paper:
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has appealed a Florida judge’s ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
There was a hearing in Congress today on climate science, though it apparently changed nothing: the Republican leadership in the committee is going to proceed with legislation to try to roll back the EPA regulations relating to carbon dioxide imposed by the Obama administration.
The most interesting detail I gleaned from the above article however was this quote, written by the Science journalist himself, Eli Kintisch:
The hearing barely touched on the underlying issue, namely, is it appropriate for Congress to involve itself so deeply into the working of a regulatory agency? Are there precedents? And what are the legal and governance implications of curtailing an agency’s authority in this way?
What a strange thing to write. If I remember correctly, we are a democracy, and the people we elect to Congress are given the ultimate responsibility and authority to legislate. There are no “legal or governance implications.” If they want to rein in a regulatory agency, that is their absolute Constitutional right. That Kintisch and his editors at Science don’t seem to understand this basic fact about American governance is most astonishing.
What a clown! Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) has suddenly discovered the federal government is broke.
“Now [that] we’re at $14 trillion in debt, I think the answer is – responsibly – we’re not going to get there [a balanced budget] in ten years, but we have to be on a very considered path to get there, certainly, within the next decade and a half or two decades,
Trouble is, Steny, that debt was mostly created when you were in charge in Congress.
Oink! Oink! Don’t cut federal funding for cowboy poets, squeals Harry Reid.
