A summary of the IRS scandal testimony today before the House Oversight Committee.
With video. The key point is that the harassment of conservatives was managed and controlled in Washington, D.C., by high IRS officials including Lois Lerner and White House appointees.
The new brownshirts: The New Black Panther Party is offering a $10,000 bounty for the capture and kidnapping of George Zimmerman.
Watch the video at the link. (I was especially struck by the uniforms, which strongly reminded me of Nazi uniforms in the 1930s.) They are holding themselves above the law, with the right to kidnap and imprison anyone they happen to dislike or disagree with.
Update: A commenter has noted that this is not a new story. The Panthers offered this bounty back in March 2012, before Zimmerman was charged. I should note however that this really doesn’t change anything, as these thugs were still making themselves judge, jury, and executioners, and above the law.
Engineers have announced that their last ditch efforts to repair the reaction wheels on Kepler will begin today.
I remain skeptical they will succeed, but am very glad they are trying.
The IRS scandal moves up the chain of command: Testimony today revealed that the harassment of conservatives was managed by a White House appointee in the IRS chief counsel’s office.
It appears that one of the four individuals whose tax records were illegally accessed for political reasons was Delaware senatorial Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell.
Investigators for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an influential Republican who serves on the Finance and Judiciary committees, have uncovered one key issue: a backdoor system in which state officials can access Americans’ private tax records in the name of investigating with little oversight or accountability. [emphasis mine]
Now isn’t that reassuring?
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A third federal court has ruled that Obama’s fake recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Broad violated the Constitution.
The worst part of this violation by Obama and his cohorts is that, even after these rulings, the illegally appointed board has continued to issue regulations, ignoring the decisions of all the courts.
Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) is proposing a merger of two NASA centers to save money.
The amendment would establish a Center Realignment and Closure Commission that would be given six months to evaluate “[c]onsolidating all rocket development and test activities of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center in one location” and recommend a location promising the greatest cost savings. The commission would also be asked to look at “[r]elocating all operations of the Marshall Space Flight Center to both the Stennis Space Center and Johnson Space Center.”
Now this is interesting. The Marshall Space Flight Center has been looking for a reason to exist for decades, since the end of the Apollo program. Any smart private company would have shut it down long ago to save money.
But then, this is government. The article, hostile to the idea of eliminating any government facility, describes quite succinctly why NASA can’t build anything cheaply and why nothing in government ever shrinks. Our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities.
One of the world’s longest running experiments, now 69 years old, has finally captured on camera the fall of a drop of tar pitch.
The Dublin pitch-drop experiment was set up in 1944 at Trinity College Dublin to demonstrate the high viscosity or low fluidity of pitch — also known as bitumen or asphalt — a material that appears to be solid at room temperature, but is in fact flowing, albeit extremely slowly.
Video below the fold.
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Astronomers have found evidence which suggests that most of the universe’s gold was created during the collision and merger of two neutron stars.
A binary of two neutron stars will eventually spiral into each other. When they do, scientists believe that their violent merger produces short gamma ray bursts (GRB). Observations of a short GRB burst in June found a lot of spectroscopic evidence of gold.
[T]he explosion had been responsible for the creation of a whole menagerie of heavy elements. They estimated that an equivalent of 1% of the sun’s matter was being flung out from the collision in a tail, and about 10 parts per million of that tail was made of gold.
Working for the Democratic Party: The harassment of conservative groups by the IRS was planned and run by officials in Washington, D.C., according to a retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday in the House.
Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.
It appears he is naming names. Thursday’s hearing should be quite interesting.
Part of a gas cloud, being ripped apart by the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has already swung past the black hole.
“The ionised gas at the head of the cloud is now stretched over more than 150 light-hours (about 160 billion kilometres) at the pericentre of the orbit around the black hole, with the closest approach being about 25 light-hours (or a bit more than 25 billion kilometres)”, explains Stefan Gillessen from MPE, who led the observing team. “The pericentre approach however is not a singular event but rather a process that will be stretching over a period of at least one year.”
The black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), is more than 4 billion times the mass of our Sun, but emits very little energy for its size. (Most super massive black holes emit energy as they swallow the mass around them.) Astronomers are hoping that they will see some action when it eats this cloud sometime next year.
O goody: The IRS now claims that the government official who willfully accessed confidential tax records illegally was not an IRS employee.
How does this make anything better? Instead of an IRS official rummaging through confidential tax records for political purposes, they apparently let others in government do it directly.
