All your Moon rocks are belong to us: A NASA sting nets a woman offering to sell a Moon rock for $1.7M.
Chinese journalists were barred from all official press areas during the Endeavour launch.
A NASA spokesperson says the agency was simply following instructions in last month’s 2011 spending bill that averted a government-wide shutdown. The legislation prohibits NASA from using any resources to host visits by a Chinese official to any NASA facility as well as for collaborations with any Chinese government entity. The Chinese journalists work for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, and thus are considered government employees.
The real Obama and gun control.
On March 30, the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Jim Brady, who sustained a debilitating head wound in the attack, and his wife, Sarah, came to Capitol Hill to push for a ban on the controversial “large magazines.” Brady, for whom the law requiring background checks on handgun purchasers is named, then met with White House press secretary Jay Carney. During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control, “to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda,” she said.
“I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Brady recalled the president telling them. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
In the meeting, she said, Obama discussed how records get into the system and what can be done about firearms retailers. Her husband specifically brought up the proposed ban on large magazine clips, and she noted that even former vice president Dick Cheney had suggested that some restrictions on the clips might make sense.
“He just laughed,” Sarah Brady said approvingly of the president. Both she and her husband, she emphasized, had absolute confidence that the president was committed to regulation. [emphasis mine]
The court jester speaks: Harry Reid said Thursday it would be “foolish” for the Democrats to offer their own budget plan.
A family in Missouri faces a federal fine of over $90,000 for simply selling bunny-rabbits.
“She said, ‘Well, Mr. Dollarhite, I’ve got the report on my desk, and I’m just gonna tell you that, once I review it, it’s our intent to prosecute you to the maximum that we can’ and that ‘we will make an example out of you.” When John once again tried to determine which law he and his wife had violated, he said the USDA lady replied, “We’ll forward you everything.”
“Ma’am, what law have we broken,” John said.
“Well, you sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in one calendar year,” she replied, according to John.
Thugs.
Our tax dollars for partisan politics: EPA has given millions to environmentalist political activist groups.
TSA does a security drill, and forgets to tell the police.
Boehner meets with tea party activists from his district. “The mood was less than cordial.”
Surely, there are Tea Party activists with unreasonable expectations of what Republicans can accomplish with control of the House. However, the major beef Tea Partiers have with Republicans is not their lack of accomplishment. It’s their unwillingness to stand and fight, their apparent lack of principle, and the resulting impotence toward shifting the narrative in Washington.
More thrilling budgetary news: The Social Security deficit is now “permanent.”
Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund is now slated to run out of money in 2024, or five years earlier than last year’s projection, while Social Security’s trust fund will be exhausted by 2036, a year earlier than the prior projection.
Napolitano: “Very, very, very few” people get TSA patdowns. NOT!
PolitiFact Georgia therefore took the TSA figures and did some math. The TSA’s Allen told us that “on an average day, about 2 million people are screened at TSA checkpoints.” Three percent of 2 million is 60,000 people. That means that over the course of a month, roughly 1.8 million people receive a pat-down. That’s more than four times the population of Atlanta.
Philladelphia police harass, threaten to shoot man legally carrying gun.
I guess they finally found out what’s in it: Twenty percent of the new waivers to ObamaCare are in Nancy Pelosi’s district.
Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers. Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.
Then there’s this new poll: By 17 percentage points, Americans support repeal.
Repeal is supported by men and women; by those in their 30s, 40s, 50s to mid-60s, and mid-60s on up; and by all income groups (ranging from under-$20,000 to over-$100,000 a year).
Senate Democrats: Where is your budget?
With the statutory committee deadline having been missed by six weeks, and with 744 days gone by since the Democrat-led Senate passed a budget, it was reported that this week Senate Democrats would finally produce a budget and hold a markup. But no budget was produced and the markup was delayed yet again.
The Republicans might not be very serious about spending cuts, but the Democrats are a downright joke. At least the Republicans have made some effort to deal with the problem, tepid as that effort is. The Democrats not only oppose any suggestion, they can’t even do their job.
Former “alarmist” scientist says human-caused global warming is based on false science.
Bill Clinton yesterday called for the creation of a government agency, either by the U.S or UN, to discredit bad political reporting and quash Internet rumors.
Doesn’t that sound just peachy keen: giving the government the power to correct and control political reporting.
Surprise surprise! Social Security and Medicare are running out of funds sooner than expected.
The House budget for the TSA has deleted funding for more body scanners.
Though I think denying the TSA this money is a good thing, this paragraph from the article stood out to me:
The measure includes $7.8 billion for the TSA, which Republicans said was a $125 million increase from current levels but $293 million less than the administration’s budget request.
In 2008 the TSA’s budget was approximately $6.99 billion. Considering how the Republicans wanted to bring spending back to 2008 levels, how can we take them seriously about getting control of the deficit if they agree to an overall budget increase for the TSA?
Why don’t we just repeal it? “An umbrella group representing premier organizations such as the Mayo Clinic wrote the administration Wednesday saying that more than 90 percent of its members would not participate, because the rules as written are so onerous it would be nearly impossible for them to succeed.” There’s also this lovely quote:
[The Obamacare regulations] are overly prescriptive, operationally burdensome, and the incentives are too difficult to achieve to make this voluntary program attractive.
Pork and more pork: NASA is considering turning Congress’s heavy-lift rocket requirement, the program-formerly-called-Constellation, into a shuttle-derived rocket that would cost $10 billion and only fly once.
Want more evidence that government spending is out of control? In one California city lifeguards earn $100K to $200K per year. They also retire with 90 percent of their salary, after only 30 years of work at as early as the age of 50.
A judge has ordered the Obama administration to act on six offshore drilling permits within 30 days.
Pakistan has cut off nine foreign satellite news channels, including the BBC, Voice of America, CNN, Fox,, NBC, CNS, IBN, Sky News, and Al Jazeera.
[Information Minister Firdous Aashiq Awan] said that certain violations had been observed in the past week’s coverage of the Abbottabad operation to kill al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. “They were spitting venom against Pakistan,” said the information minister.
The delays in launching Endeavour has pushed back the last shuttle mission to mid-July.
The FAA: slow to ramp up in its role of regulating human space travel.
This ain’t good. It also is not a surprise. The only real question is whether the government bureaucrats at the FAA will get out of the way of those who are really trying to do the work.
NASA management appears ready to approve combining SpaceX’s next two test flights of the Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket into one test flight. This despite Russian opposition.
We’re here to help you! U.N. rescue forces from Nepal were the ones who introduced cholera to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
Soon after the start of the outbreak, which has sickened close to 300,000 people and killed nearly 5000, Haitians fingered the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which has a camp populated by Nepalese soldiers in Mirebalais in the Centre Department, very close to where the first cholera cases occurred. The camp was also blamed in a leaked epidemiological report by a French cholera expert, Renaud Piarroux of the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, written at the request of the Haitian government. Several genetic studies showed that the Haitian cholera strain strongly resembled others found recently in South Asia—although none pinpointed Nepal specifically.
Yet some cholera scientists—including Rita Colwell, seen by many as a giant in the field—contended that the bacteria had more likely been present in local waters, and that the outbreak had been triggered by a combination of environmental factors.
Rita Colwell is hardly what I’d call a “giant in the field,” at least nowadays. Though her biography lists a lot of research work, the last decade she has spent most of her time playing politics as a political appointee, going from one government agency to another.
How shall Europe’s ATV freighter to ISS be upgraded?
The government marches on! The FAA wants your opinion about its future commercial space regulations.
Or to put it another way, how to stifle a newborn in the womb. In 2004 I said the new law allowing this kind of regulation was going to hurt the new space industries. We are about to see, with the FAA’s regulatory effort here, exactly how that will play out.
And I don’t think it will be good.
According to a new Rasmussen poll, the Ryan Plan is losing support nationally.
If this is so, we are really in trouble, especially since there presently is no other realistic option on the table.
Putin sacks the head of the Russian space agency.
