Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Here’s some detailed analysis by scientists of the meteorite fossil paper.
Once again, there is a great deal of skepticism, most of which appears reasonably and justified. Though a number of scientists have applauded his work, it really looks like Hoover does not have sufficient evidence to claim his samples are alien biology. However, this quote stands out:
It appears likely that Hoover’s study may soon be ignored by the majority of the scientific community, instead of enjoying a healthy debate such as that raised by McKay’s 1996 paper on the Mars meteorite. Redfield says that a microbiologist that she knows refused to read it. [emphasis mine]
That hardly seems the right response from an open-minded scientist.
More evidence that Penn State’s investigation of IPCC climate researcher Michael Mann was a whitewash.
The key point is that the Penn State investigators never interviewed a principal who was able to confirm or deny a key charge against “Hockey Stick” lead author of “Hide the Decline” infamy Michael Mann. This individual has now been interviewed, and what he told federal investigators has indicted Mann and Penn State.
I have noted this already, the very week the Penn State report was issued, but it is nice to see there is further evidence to confirm my conclusions.
An NPR senior exec: “We would be better off in the long-run without federal funding.”
Stealth unionization. “Many day care providers didn’t even know they were in the union until notified after the vote had concluded.”
The future of Obamacare: bureaucracy and pulling strings.
This is horrible: It appears that the man who killed two American soldiers in Frankfort was partly motivated by watching clips taken from one of Hollywood’s numerous anti-Iraq war films.
The tiger stripe fissures on Saturn’s moon Enceladus have turned out to be far hotter than predicted.
Want to know what’s inside X-37b? New Scientist dug around in the patent office and got some clues. Key quote:
Boeing reveals in the patent that the solar array has been designed to permit fast folding and stowing. The reason? So the X-37B can fold the solar array away, fire its thrusters and change its orbit to confound adversaries. This would be useful for satellites, too, says Boeing: “The ability to completely re-stow would offer mission flexibility to move the satellite thus making its orbit unpredictable.”
The scientific battle over the meteorite fossil paper continues.
Does this seem as crazy to you as it does to me? At the same time the Obama administration is fighting to prevent any new drilling for oil, it is also now considering tapping our strategic oil reserve to get more oil into the market.
