POLITICS - Goose-Stepping Republicans 2010

"Inner-GOP sniping increases in wake of Tea Party successes" by Tom Cohen, CNN 9/20/2010

Excerpt

Tea Party euphoria confronted reality Sunday, with Delaware Senate primary winner Christine O'Donnell backing out of scheduled talk show appearances amid talk of possible civil war among Republicans over the conservative movement.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski accused the Tea Party Express of infusing money and lies into her Republican primary to swing it against her.

Now waging a write-in campaign to retain her seat, against the wishes of mainstream Republicans, Murkowski told CNN that fellow party members were inciting inner-GOP conflict.

"What happened in my particular race, you had the Tea Party Express, this California-based group, come in at the last minute in a campaign, run a mudslinging, smear -- just a terrible, terrible campaign, with lies and fabrications and mischaracterization," Murkowski said on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "They came in, they dumped $600,000 into a small market here in Alaska, and they absolutely clearly influenced the outcome of that election."

"Tea Party Victory Opens Rift Between Moderate and Conservative Republicans"by DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and CARL HULSE, New York Times 9/19/2010

Excerpt

The few remaining Republican centrists in the Senate were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Michael N. Castle of Delaware, a longtime and reliable moderate voice who could provide some counterbalance to the wave of conservatives poised to enter Congress and the steadily rightward shift of party leaders.

But Mr. Castle was defeated in his party primary on Tuesday by Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party insurgent. And while the conservative wing rejoiced, the surprise outcome raised serious questions about the future place in the party of lawmakers like Senators Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and other Republicans in the Senate and House who are not lock-step conservatives.

This is a prime example of why I left the Republican Party in 2000. They have become goose-stepping idealogs with no room for moderate Republicans and where "compromise" is a dirty word.

POLITICS - More Truth About Republicans

"Huckabee Opposes Insurance For People With Pre-Existing Conditions (with AUDIO)" by Brian Beutler, TPM 9/17/2010

When Republicans attack health care reform, Democrats like to counter by accusing Republicans of wanting to repeal a law that requires insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions. According to Republican Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, that's exactly right. People with pre-existing conditions, he explains are like houses that have already burned down.

"It sounds so good, and it's such a warm message to say we're not gonna deny anyone from a preexisting condition," Huckabee explained at the Value Voters Summit today. "Look, I think that sounds terrific, but I want to ask you something from a common sense perspective. Suppose we applied that principle [to] our property insurance. And you can call your insurance agent and say, "I'd like to buy some insurance for my house." He'd say, "Tell me about your house." "Well sir, it burned down yesterday, but I'd like to insure it today." And he'll say "I'm sorry, but we can't insure it after it's already burned." Well, no preexisting conditions."

A moment of candor from the evangelical former Arkansas governor. Hard to say how that comports with voting on values, though.

It's worth pointing out, too, that the health care law's individual mandate is in large part meant to make sure people don't wait until they get ill until they buy insurance. But Republicans want to do away with that part of reform as well.

Yap. Republican logic, your health = your home, Healthcare Insurance = Home Insurance.

This is PROF that Republicans do not think Healthcare Insurance is in business of providing true healthcare, they are in business of PROFIT ONLY (aka to hell with your health).

POLITICS - Taxpayers, Voters, Be Aware

"INSIDE WASHINGTON: GOP mail group wears 2 hats" by DENNIS CONRAD (AP), Seattle Times 9/18/2010

Excerpt

When Republican members of Congress need literature to send out to constituents on their doings in office, dozens turn to a Utah firm that churns out slick, full-color mailers at taxpayer expense.

When they need political mailers designed to get them re-elected, some of them turn to the same people.

In theory, policy and politics are separate enterprises in Washington. In practice, they are joined at the hip.

The line between them may be blurred more than usual in the work done by sister companies with the same owners who produce franked constituent mail paid by the government, then switch to election propaganda paid by campaigns, just as an industrial plant retools its assembly line to meet changing demand.

Utah-based Arena Communications produces political direct mail for a number of House members as well as the national Republican Party and other GOP candidates. Its sister company, the Franking Group, has collected millions of federal dollars for design and printing work for dozens of Republican House members, many of them the same as its political clients.

The two companies' ties could hardly be tighter; both are owned by the same three businessmen, and they share a warehouse in Salt Lake City. And it's often hard to distinguish between the polished mailers printed on the taxpayers' dime and the re-election circulars produced and paid from political contributions.

House rules allow lawmakers to send federally financed mass mailings to their constituents as long as they're not intended to help in a re-election campaign or have some other partisan purpose.

"It only becomes tougher for lawmakers to insist there's no connection between official mail and their campaigns when the same mailing firm wears both hats," said Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union.

The owners say they hold no party posts, do not coordinate non-political work with campaign organizations and see no legal or ethical problems with how they operate.

They say their companies do their jobs separately, and note that all government-financed mailings are reviewed by a bipartisan House commission to ensure they aren't political.

Out of legal necessity, the Franking Group becomes virtually inactive at the height of the campaign season. The House bars federally financed constituent mailings within 90 days of an election, and that's when lawmakers typically shift to their political campaigns to send out their mailings.

"The Franking Group basically goes dark as we focus on - as we then put on our hats and work on - the political world," said David Jacobs, its managing partner and co-owner. He, Peter Valcarce and James Ohman jointly own the companies.

It's only natural, they say, to work solely for members of one party.

"That strategy obviously reflects the nature of the House," said Valcarce, who more than a decade ago served briefly as an aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah., and soon helped found the Franking Group. "Staffers pick sides. Consultants pick sides. Everybody at one point has to pick a side."

This is a "just trust us" issue. We taxpayers are suppose to trust that our tax dollars are NOT funding candidate's campaigns (Republican or Democratic). My view, "Trust no one" (X-File quote).

ECONOMY - Wall Street Slow Down

"Wall Street’s Profit Engines Slow Down" by NELSON D. SCHWARTZ, New York Times 9/19/2010

Excerpt

Inside the great investment houses on Wall Street, business has taken a surprising turn — downward.

Even after taxpayer bailouts restored bankers’ profits and pay, the great Wall Street money machine is decelerating. Big financial institutions, including commercial banks, are still making a lot of money. But given unease in the financial markets and the economy, brokerages and investment banks are not making nearly as much as their executives, employees and investors had hoped.

After an unusually sharp slowdown in trading this summer, analysts are rethinking their profit forecasts for 2010.

The activities at the heart of what Wall Street does — selling and trading stocks and bonds, and advising on mergers — are running at levels well below where they were at this point last year, said Meredith Whitney, a bank analyst who was among the first to warn of the subprime mortgage disaster and its impact on big banks.

Worldwide, the number of stock offerings is down 15 percent from this time last year, while bond issuance is off 25 percent, according to Capital IQ, a research firm. Based on these trends, Ms. Whitney predicts that annual revenue from Wall Street’s main businesses will drop 25 percent, to around $42 billion in 2010, from $56 billion last year.

While the numbers will not be known until after the third quarter ends and financial companies begin reporting earnings in October, the pace of trading this summer was slow even by normal summer standards. Trading in shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange was down by 11 percent in July from 2009 levels, and August volume was off nearly 30 percent.

“What’s happened in the third quarter is that after a very slow summer, people expected things to come back,” said Ms. Whitney. “But they haven’t, and the inactivity is really squeezing everyone.”

"Really squeezing everyone," what an understatement, this includes the job market. Note that this is NOT a political issue, this is Wall-Street Greed (self interest at the cost of the rest of America) at work.

AMERICA - Our Urban Geometry

Sun Belt Sprawl
Slide Show

"The Geometry of Sprawl" by CHRISTOPH GIELEN and GEOFF MANAUGH, New York Times 9/17/2010

In his novel “The Crying of Lot 49,” Thomas Pynchon describes a suburb that is “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts — census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.” The novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, “looks down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth,” Pynchon writes, “and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.” The architectural system unfolding in front of her held, according to Pynchon, a “hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.”

Christoph Gielen, a German-born photographer, has been documenting similarly hieroglyphic settlements from a helicopter — including prisons and suburbs, seen here — for the past five years. His chosen sites are distinguished by their clarity: they are boxes, loops, labyrinths and half-circles, exaggerations of the desert topography around them.

The prison photographs must be made quickly, Gielen points out, snatched during the aerial equivalent of a drive-by: otherwise, identification marks on a lingering helicopter tail might be noted by prison officials and questions would inevitably result. His visits are thus precise and oddly guerrilla, even though they are technically legal, and satellite views of the very same places remain easily available to the public.

Through Gielen’s lens, outdoor exercise yards become nothing more than cages, cramped prostheses on the backs of the prisons proper; whatever freedom or physical excitement such spaces were meant to offer looks appropriately absurd from such heights.

For Gielen’s suburban missions, on the other hand, his method is to start with a satellite search, surveying the landscape county-by-county till the right, optically provocative geometries are found. To zoom in further on these arranged environments, he occasionally visits them by car, dressing up as a potential home buyer and touring the sites with a real estate agent, gaining insight into the neighborhood’s aspirations: how it sees itself, or, at least, how it is portrayed in the marketing pamphlets and sales pitches of local residents. Far from humanizing the subject, this adds a further layer of abstraction; the landscape’s aesthetics, or lack thereof, become economic calculations. Gielen’s interest in keeping these locations anonymous only furthers this alienation.

The Sun Belt suburbs depicted in these photographs are “absolutely self-contained,” Gielen suggests; many of them, he adds, are “not changing anymore.” They are static, crystalline and inorganic. Indeed, some of these streets frame retirement communities: places to move to once you’ve already been what you’ve set out to be. This isn’t sprawl, properly speaking. They are locations in their own right, spatial endpoints of certain journeys.

Looking at Gielen’s work, it’s tempting to propose a new branch of the human sciences: geometric sociology, a study of nothing but the shapes our inhabited spaces make. Its research agenda would ask why these forms, angles and geometries emerge so consistently, from prehistoric settlements to the fringes of exurbia. Are sites like these an aesthetic pursuit, a mathematical accident, a calculated bending of property lines based on glitches in the local planning code or an emergent combination of all these factors? Or are they the expression of something buried deep in human culture and the unconscious, something only visible from high above?

POLITICS - GOP's Same Old Tune, "Not Our Fault"

"Democrats attacked for GOP’s mistakes" by DON CHURCH, Norwich Bulletin 9/16/2010

The Norwich Bulletin editorial stated the Democrats’ stimulus programs have worked. Yes, that’s the absolute truth by all nonpartisan indicators, but web page reaction to this fair and balanced editorial drew rants that smell of Republican talking points — Bush-type smear and fear babble — as reliable as Fox’s faux news.

These talking heads claim everything from “businesses will hire when government regulations are eased;” “I don’t blame business and industry for sitting on their hands until the regulatory climate changes for the better” to “business will start to get active after we throw the bums (including U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District) out.”

George Bush and Republican congressional majority, for six years, deregulated business allowing the sub-prime market and Wall Street to collapse, record unemployment, a climbing national debt and two disastrous wars, costing taxpayers millions a day and killing thousands of Americans. Informed voters threw out Republicans and elected a Democratic majority in 2008.

That was less than two years ago. President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress can’t be faulted for not creating a miracle of Biblical proportions in one-fourth the time it took Bush to sink the economy.

It’s easier to destroy than to build.

DON CHURCH

Groton

It IS "easier to destroy than to build" for the GOP. The party of NO!

POLITICS - GOP Blockheads

"Gingrich threatens extinct strategy: Shut down the government" by Robert Reich, Christian Science Monitor 9/17/2010

Newt Gingrich is saying if Republicans win back control of Congress and reach a budget impasse with the President, they should shut down the government again. GOP pollster Dick Morris is echoing those sentiments, as is Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R. Ga), and Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller.

I am continuously amazed at the GOP’s ability to snatch defeat out of the jaws of potential victory. It is the gift that keeps giving.

I was there November 14, 1995 when Newt Gingrich pulled the plug on the federal government the first time. It proved to be the stupidest political move in recent history. Not only did it help Bill Clinton win reelection but it was a boon to almost all other Democrats in 1996 (Gingrich’s photo was widely used in negative ads), and the move damaged Republicans for years.

Gingrich hurt his cause by complaining that Bill Clinton had put him in the back of Air Force One on a trip that occurred about the same time. Republican lore has it that it was this babyish behavior rather than the shutdown itself that caused the public to side with Clinton in the game of chicken Gingrich launched over the budget. Undoubtedly Gingrich’s whining didn’t help, but it was his cavalier attitude toward government itself that was the defining issue. Gingrich was the one who first bragged he’d shut down the government if Clinton didn’t agree to what the Republicans wanted.

Now, remarkably, Gingrich is back at it.

Dick Armey says it’s “premature” to talk about doing any such thing. What Armey means is if the public sees Republicans already plotting a shutdown, they’ll react even more angrily than they did fifteen years ago.

Americans may be cynical about government but we’re proud of our system of governance. And we don’t want it to be used as a political pawn in partisan power games. That’s what Republicans forget time and again. They dislike government so much they don’t see the difference between government as a bureaucracy and democratic governance as a cherished system.

The framers of the Constitution developed checks and balances to assure one branch didn’t accumulate too much power. But they never contemplated that one party could shut down the entire governmental system if it didn’t get what it wanted.

I'm NOT surprised, the GOP-Blockheads NEVER learn.

Picture Newt (the child) throwing a tantrum.

POLITICS - Getting Around GOP Obstructionism

"Obama will put Warren in special advisory role for consumer agency, sidestepping confirmation" by Brady Dennis, Washington Post 9/16/2010

Excerpt

President Obama this week plans to name Harvard law Professor Elizabeth Warren as a special adviser so that she can oversee a new consumer financial protection bureau while avoiding a potentially vicious Senate confirmation fight, according to people with direct knowledge of the decision.

The appointment would place Warren - adored by liberals and consumer advocates, viewed with suspicion by many bankers and congressional Republicans - in charge of the new regulator that she proposed three years ago to protect Americans against lending abuses.

Warren is expected to take on a dual role as assistant to the president and special adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, giving her primary responsibility for shaping the consumer watchdog in the coming months.

The financial overhaul bill signed into law in July gives the new bureau and its leader broad autonomy to write and enforce rules governing credit cards, mortgages and other such loans.

Under the law, the Treasury maintains responsibility for setting up the new regulator until the president nominates a director, subject to approval by the Senate.

By appointing Warren to a post within the administration - much as the White House did with "car czar" Steven Rattner and "compensation czar" Kenneth Feinberg - Obama would free her to act as the bureau's director beginning immediately while avoiding a confirmation battle. The move also will thrill the consumer groups, labor unions, academics and liberal lawmakers that have lobbied relentlessly for her to lead the new regulator.

The administration's plan to appoint Warren was first reported by ABC News.

The decision on one of the most anticipated appointments of the Obama presidency emerged after numerous conversations with Warren and weeks of hand-wringing over which approach to take.

Scores of Obama nominations far less polarizing than Warren's have languished in the divided Senate for months. Warren herself has told allies on Capitol Hill that she would prefer to avoid a prolonged confirmation process.

ECONOMY - Declining Middle Class?

"Arianna Huffington Zeroes in on Declining Middle Class in New Book"
PBS Newshour 9/16/2010

WORLD - The Latest on Cuba

"In Cuba, Hints of Dramatic Change Emerge from Fidel Castro"
PBS Newshour 9/16/2010

ECONOMY - More Americans Join Ranks of the Poor

"US adds 4.8 million more to ranks of the poor as poverty rate jumps" by Ron Scherer, Christian Science Monitor 9/16/2010

The deepest recession in modern times has sharply increased the ranks of the poor during the past year, with 1 in 7 people in America officially counted as living in poverty.

The news from a US Census Bureau report released Thursday underscores how deeply the Great Recession has affected the nation's standard of living. The key findings of report, which compared income, poverty rate, and health-care insurance coverage in 2009 with 2008 numbers, include the following.

1. Some 43.6 million people were living in poverty last year – the highest number since 1959, five years before President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty. The poverty rate was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 and the highest level since 1994. Hispanic households took the hardest hit: Their poverty rate rose 2.1 percent from 2008's level, compared with a 1.1 percent jump in the rate for blacks and whites. (The US government considers an annual income of $21,756 to be the poverty line for a family of four.)


2. A record number of Americans, 50.7 million, were not covered by health-care insurance in 2009. At the same time the survey was being taken, Congress passed President Obama’s contentious health-care reform law.


3. The median household income was $49,800 last year, about the same as in 2008. This "hold steady" figure for income may reflect the fact that many people were helped by the government safety net, such as unemployment insurance, which Congress repeatedly extended and which kept some 3.3 million people out of poverty, according to the Census data.

The data, contained in a statistic-thick 87-page report, are likely to have widespread implications for policymakers, say economists and analysts. Here is how some of them interpret the numbers.

• The poverty rate is likely to rise further, predicts Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, in a new analysis. The rate will approach 16 percent and stay high for most of this decade, she says. The recession will add some 10 million people, including 6 million children, to the poverty rolls.


Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, writes in an analysis that in the past three recessions the poverty rate has not fallen until a year after the unemployment rate began to fall.


• Some advocates for the poor hope the new data spur Congress to ameliorate the situation for the needy. One way would be to renew the Emergency Contingency Fund (ECF), part of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which expires at the end of this month. The fund, targeted to low-income individuals, pays employers to take on workers.


“It helps pay for the cost of bringing a new person on,” says Rachel Gragg, federal policy director at the National Skills Coalition, which is lobbying Congress to extend the program for another year at a cost of $2.5 billion. “Most states say they will have to stop their existing programs if it’s not extended,” she says.

Another program designed to help low-income people, the Earned Income Tax Credit (or Making Work Pay program), is set to expire, too, on Dec. 31. “With this report, extending that could be a discussion item,” says economist Richard DeKaser of Woodley Park Research in Washington. “With poverty at its highest level, you could argue the least fortunate should be shielded from a tax burden.”


• Congress may want to delve deeper into safety net programs such as TANF and Medicaid, suggests Ron Haskins, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Lawmakers are likely to find that Medicaid has “expanded like mad” because fewer Americans now have private health-care coverage. “It’s functioning like a good safety net program,” he says, adding that the same can be said for food stamps. But, he says, Congress might want to examine TANF, which replaced welfare, to examine why the program hasn't grown, even with higher poverty. “No one knows why,” he says.



• After the November election, Congress may dissect the data to determine how to reduce the budget deficit, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pa. “The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in December may want to tie how to pay for fiscal austerity to the distribution of income and wealth,” he says. “Where is the burden going to fall?”

The problem is when "fiscal austerity" = MORE joining the ranks of the poor. Which, if history is any guide, is what will happen.

"Record Poverty Level: 'Long Slog Ahead' for Poor Americans?"
PBS Newshour 9/16/2010

OIL SPILL - Let the Litigations Begin

"Hearing into Gulf lawsuits opens in New Orleans" by Tom Hals, Reuters 9/16/2010

A federal judge began on Thursday sorting through hundreds of lawsuits resulting from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as shrimpers, restaurateurs and others pressed their cases against BP Plc and its partners.

Most of the cases were sent from around the United States last month to District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans. He will oversee what is expected to be among the costliest and most complex litigation in U.S. history.

Over 400 people packed the courtroom and two overflow rooms for the hearing, court security said, to hear Barbier talk about the types of legal proceedings in play, including potential civil and criminal lawsuits from the U.S. Department of Justice.

"One of the tasks we will have will be how to organize and structure and coordinate all the related things going on," Barbier said.

The April explosion of a rig called the Deepwater Horizon led to a disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing a halt to commercial fishing and closing beaches.

The two sides went to court on Thursday having agreed to break the lawsuits into bundles, such as lawsuits by injured rig workers and claims by businesses.

Barbier faces the task of stitching together widely divergent interests, including those of the companies involved.

BP has set up a $20 billion fund to pay claims stemming from the spill, and hired the Obama administration's former executive pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, to administer it.

Those hurt by the spill have urged the court to move to trial as quickly as possible. They want BP and its co-defendants, including Transocean Ltd and Halliburton Co, to turn over evidence such as contracts and e-mails in the coming weeks.

A group of attorneys from Texas who represent injured rig workers has broken away from the other plaintiffs and wants the court to move even faster.

The defendants have argued that people who lost income or business from the spill cannot sue until they give BP's fund a chance to pay their claims.

The U.S. government has asked that any lawsuits it brings be hived off from the rest, but environmentalists want those lawsuits grouped with theirs.

In addition to the tactical issues, values must be set on claims.

The case in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana is In re Oil Spill by the Oil Rig "Deepwater Horizon" in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, 2010, No. 10-MDL-2179.

CALIFORNIA - More Opposition to Anti Global Warming Prop

"Sempra Energy Joins Opposition to California Proposition 23" MarketWatch 9/14/2010

Sempra Energy (trimmed stock market data) today announced that it has joined opposition to Proposition 23, the November California ballot initiative seeking to suspend AB32, the state's landmark global warming law.

AB32 requires a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in California to 1990 levels by 2020.

"We support California's pioneering effort to transition to a low-carbon economy and AB32 provides the critical path for getting there," said Donald E. Felsinger, chairman and chief executive officer of Sempra Energy. "Applied properly, AB32 will promote clean technology, create new 'green' jobs and reduce air pollution. At Sempra Energy, we are implementing California's aggressive public policy agenda by investing in clean-burning natural gas and renewable energy resources."

Sempra Energy -- the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, Southern California Gas Co., Sempra Generation, Sempra Pipelines & Storage and Sempra LNG -- has among the lowest carbon-emission rates in U.S. utility sector. Through its subsidiaries, Sempra Energy is an industry leader in energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative-fuel vehicles and smart grid development.

Sempra Energy, based in San Diego, is a Fortune 500 energy services holding company with 2009 revenues of more than $8 billion. The Sempra Energy companies' 13,800 employees serve about 29 million consumers worldwide.

Sempra Pipelines & Storage, Sempra Generation, Sempra LNG and RBS Sempra Commodities dba Sempra Energy Solutions and Sempra Energy Trading are not the same companies as the utility, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) or Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), and Sempra Pipelines & Storage, Sempra Generation, Sempra LNG and RBS Sempra Commodities dba Sempra Energy Solutions and Sempra Energy Trading are not regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission.

Prop 23 is essentially an anit-enviroment (global warming) measure, disquized as saving money.

San Diego is also a hot-bed of enengy development (= jobs) that includes decreasing greenhouse gasses.

CALIFORNIA - Shootout San Francisco

"Inside the mind of a man involved in 580 shootout"
KGO-TV San Francisco, CA 9/15/2010

AUTOS - X Marks the Spot

"3 Teams Win Fuel-Efficient Car Prize" by RONALD AHRENS, New York Times 9/16/2010

Excerpt

Teams from Virginia, North Carolina and Winterthur, Switzerland, with roots in the world of auto racing have won the first Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, the $10 million competition aimed at advancing the technology for more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The competition, which began in 2007 with 136 vehicles from 111 teams, required that the vehicles achieve 100 miles per gallon or the energy equivalent. While two of winning vehicles reached that goal with electric power plants, the top winner did it with an internal combustion engine.

“When you have a background in racing, you focus on what you’re trying to achieve, and you know that you have a given time period to do it,” said Oliver Kuttner, the founder and chief executive of Edison2 of Lynchburg, Va., which won the $5 million top prize with its Edison2 Very Light Car. The company’s fabricators and mechanics have worked for teams participating in auto races like the 24 Hours of Daytona and Indianapolis 500.

The other winners of $2.5 million each were the Wave II, a battery-electric vehicle from Li-Ion Motors of Mooresville, N.C., in the heart of Nascar country, and the E-Tracer, a battery-electric, enclosed motorcyclelike vehicle from Peraves of Winterthur, which is near Zurich.

The Automotive X Prize is the latest undertaking of the X Prize Foundation of Playa Vista, Calif., which had sponsored the $10 million Ansari Space X Prize that was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, creators of SpaceShipOne. Other foundation competitions include the Google Lunar X Prize, the Archon Genomics X Prize and the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge.

Bold emphasis mine

ECONOMY - New vs Old GM

"Amid Blight and Scavenging, ‘Old G.M.’ Plants Linger" by BILL VLASIC and NICK BUNKLEY, New York Times 9/14/2010

Excerpt

FLINT, Mich. — By day, hundreds of General Motors workers make pistons and other engine parts at a factory on this city’s east side. By night, gangs of thieves have repeatedly looted empty G.M. plants on the same property, and have twice fired shots at security guards.

The scene at Flint North, as the complex of mostly closed factories is known, is a vivid reminder that the automaker’s bankruptcy last year gave birth to two different G.M.’s — and that one of them is struggling in the shadow of the other.

When American taxpayers bailed out General Motors, the company was split, with the best assets going to the reorganized automaker of the same name. This new General Motors is selling cars, making money and preparing a public stock offering.

The least valuable assets, including the run-down factories in Flint, were left in the shell of the old G.M., now named the Motors Liquidation Company.

This company has filed a bankruptcy reorganization plan that lays out how it will clean up and sell off the dozens of unwanted pieces of what was once the world’s largest automaker.

But the process is slow, and while plant closings have already cost jobs and tax revenue in many communities, the empty factories themselves are now becoming a burden.

Note that using a "liquidation company" is normal business practice when dealing with bankruptcy. In this case GM is running their own vs hiring an outside liquidation company.

ECONOMY - More on Midterm Tax Cut Debate

"Shields and Brooks Examine 'Islamaphobia,' Obama's Midterm Tax Cut Debate" PBS Newshour Transcript (has video) 9/10/2010

Excerpt (on tax cuts)

MARK SHIELDS (syndicated columnist): And I just wanted to point this out, that Bill Clinton came into office on January 20, 1993. He left on January 20, 2001. He raised taxes to a spectacularly high level, by Republican standards, to 39.6 percent. There were, in Bill Clinton's eight years, 21,872,000 jobs created in the private sector.

George Bush came in, and, following the lead of Mr. Taylor and others, cut taxes to their lowest, to 33 percent. During George Bush's eight years in the White House, from January 20, 2001, to 2009, the country lost 672,000 jobs.

JIM LEHRER (Newshour): And you think there is a direct connection?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I mean, there obviously is, because David told us last week that, if we raised it, it was going to hurt the economy.

Tax cuts for the top 2% of taxpayers = pork for the rich.

WORLD - The Megacities

"Megacities Reflect Growing Urbanization, But Poverty Still Rampant" PBS Newshour Transcript (with video) 9/8/2010

Excerpt

SOLANA PYNE, GlobalPost: The city they're moving to is growing so fast, each new census is quickly outdated. But local experts estimate it's now home to 15 million people. Dhaka is perched on the leading edge of a global trend. For the first time in human history, the world has become more urban than rural. By mid-century, some 80 percent of the Earth's population will live in cities, many of them in the exploding slums of the developing world. For good or ill, Dhaka is setting an example.

Also see: Megacity Definition

OIL SPILL - BP's Side of the Story

"BP Admits Errors in Gulf Oil Disaster But Spreads Blame"
PBS Newshour 9/8/2010

ECONOMY - President of the United States 9/8/2010

The President’s Vision for the Economy
Parma, OH (45:09 min)


ALSO

"Geithner: Bush Economic Policies Made Recession Worse" PBS Newshour 9/8/2010