AP
General Electric Co.’s health-care unit, the world’s biggest maker of medical-imaging machines, is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing to tap growth in China.
Voters finally get it.
Obama tripled the deficit his first year with the failed Obama-Pelosi stimulus plan.
In Obama’s second year the deficit topped a trillion dollars again.
It was unprecedented. 
Some of my slightly provocative Lib friends have been emailing me to make the point that this Norwegian proves that Christians are terrorists, or something like that. "What more proof do you need?"
It's best never to take the bait, because it is hopeless.
They are clearly delighted that the perpetrator was not a Moslem. It's The Narrative, you know. Before I read the details, I did assume it was a Jihad-type thing. Sounded like it he learned it from them.
Imagine a lighter-weight Cadillac CTS-V Coupe with nearly double the horsepower, a wider stance and panhandle-sized contact patches.That's the Hennessey V1000, a model the company plans to build only 12 copes of for well-to-do speed freaks
http://jalopnik.com/5824568/texas+tuned-cadillac-cts+v-coupe-will-get-1000+hp
Meet Jill McGlone:
For the last 12 years, a Virginia woman hasn’t set foot in her office and has done zero work, yet she’s been collecting an annual salary that has totaled more than $300,000. Recently, the bookkeeping mistake was discovered and her payments were discontinued, but now she’s filing for wrongful termination and unemployment benefits!
It all started more than a dozen years ago, when Jill McGlone, who had been working as an office assistant for the Norfolk Community Services Board, was suspended for “revealing confidential medical information.” Apparently, authorities forgot to suspend her pay, however, and the checks, which totaled about $26,000 per year, kept going out, according to Washington, D.C., news site TBD.
Jill McGlone loafs comfortably with a friend.
Senate Dems include $1 trillion in savings from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in their debt plan, but it may not help the U.S. avoid a credit downgrade, because the wars were already expected to end.
All last week, global warming-obsessed media were rife with reports about record-breaking heat.
Problem is, according to the National Climatic Data Center, and marvelously reported by the Hockey Schtick Sunday, almost no temperature records were actually broken:
[T]he NOAA database of all-time Max Temperature...shows that there were no records broken on July 17, July 18, July 19, or July 20th. A total of 4 stations broke records on July 21, 20 on July 22, and 10 on July 23, 2011.
That's right. There were only 34 new all-time daily temperature records set during last week's "record-breaking heat."
This is out of over 6000 records previously set for each day since such things have been reported.
Our Petulant and Inept President.
“The president and his team entered these negotiations believing he could strike a grand bargain that would allow him to present himself as a born-again budget cutter, as fiscally responsible, as a Man of the Center. And in the process, he kept instructing us, he would emerge as the only adult in the room. At this juncture, it looks like Obama is the most adolescent, even childish, figure in the negotiations – a petulant man who also happens to be an inept negotiator. This isn’t what the president and his supporters expected. But of course, that could be said for his entire presidency.”
As rumored, the short-term plan provides for a last-minute debt limit increase offset by even greater spending cuts with no tax increases. It also requires a vote on a balanced budget amendment — but doesn’t require that the amendment pass. The debt limit increase doesn’t carry the country through 2012, either. That means another politically-motivated round of debt limit negotiations — precisely what the president has said he doesn’t want.
The lightweight glasses are being developed by researchers at the University of Oxford
Research in Motion scraps 2,000 jobs, leaving the company with only 17,000 employees
Before the Bowie County Commissioner’s Court in Texas begins its official business, it recites the Pledge of Allegiance, and a prayer. But a county judge wants to be sure the written record contains no mention of those pledges or prayers, and has ordered the local clerk not to record them. She refuses to go along and cover up what she believes is right. And now could face the consequences.
Last week, Natalie Nichols, a County Clerk in Bowie, stood up to a judge and refused to erase the pledge and prayer from the official minutes of the county commissioner’s meeting. For standing on principle, she could end up paying a fine, or even go to jail.
'Ross's retirement makes his House seat a prime battleground for 2012, one that Republicans believe they can pick up'
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/#ixzz1T8gplNUr
Exclusive: Court docs show that two suspects with criminal backgrounds were able to buy more than 360 weapons under the failed anti-gun trafficking program, Operation Fast and Furious.
(YURI GRIPAS - REUTERS)
We don't yet know what the final deal to raise the debt ceiling will be. But now that Harry Reid is developing a proposal with $2.7 trillion in cuts and nothing in revenues, it's a safe bet that it won't include any tax increases. Which means that whether Republicans realize it or not, they've won.
These incredible images show free climber Ueli Steck, 35, from Ringgenberg, Switzerland smashing the record for scaling the north face of the Grandes Jorasses - part of Europe's highest mountain, Mont Blanc. The spectacular pictures were captured by a British extreme photographer in a helicopter 13,000ft in the air.
The Deutsche Presse-Agentur news agency reported that the young boy was kidnapped by militants in the Greshk district of Helmand province last Tuesday.
Nancy Pelosi has called for an investigation of David Wu (pictured rifght wearing a tiger suit) following an allegation that he'd engaged in 'aggressive and unwanted sexual behaviour' with a young woman.
“The Speaker, Sen. Reid and Sen. McConnell all agreed on the general framework of a two-part plan. A short-term increase (with cuts greater than the increase), combined with a committee to find long-term savings before the rest of the increase would be considered. Sen. Reid took the bipartisan plan to the White House and the President said no.”
The president is playing with fire. By halting a bipartisan deal he imperils the country’s finances and can rightly be accused of putting partisanship above all else. The ONLY reason to reject a short-term, two-step deal embraced by both the House and Senate is to avoid another approval-killing face-off for President Obama before the election. Next to pulling troops out of Afghanistan to fit the election calendar, this is the most irresponsible and shameful move of his presidency.
(What did Reid offer publicly this morning? Same deal, but after the election. Hmmm….)
Likely voters hold a dismal view of the news media, generally regarding reporters as biased, unethical and too close to the politicians they purport to cover, according to a new poll for The Hill.
A full 68 percent of voters consider the news media biased, the poll found. Most, 46 percent, believe the media generally favor Democrats, while 22 percent said they believe Republicans are favored, with 28 percent saying the media is reasonably balanced.
The picture is not much brighter on the general question of ethics. Fifty-seven percent of voters think of the news media as either somewhat or very unethical, while only 39 percent see them as somewhat or very ethical.
“Reminds me of my image of sand worms in Dune”
Original Post
...Relax, this is a deep sea hydrothermal worm and it is only slightly bigger than bacteria.
Posted by Yossarian
China's surging economic, and military, power has a fatal flaw. Several decades of enforcing the "one child" policy has prevented China's population from spiraling out of control over the last few decades. But it also means that there will be too many old people and too few workers in another decade, and for several decades after that. Meanwhile, the shortage of young workers is already here, as the first "one child" generations come of age. These workers demand more money, and attention. Wages are moving up rapidly, and there's still a shortage of workers. There's also a shortage of skilled people in the armed forces. Plenty of low skilled or inept volunteers, but not the ones that are most needed, and in demand.
The "one child" program has not only halted rapid growth of the Chinese population, but has permanently changed perceptions of what the optimal family size should be. The enforcement of one child families (in urban areas, country folk could usually have two kids) forced parents to lavish more attention on fewer kids. As a result, the children were better educated, and accustomed to a higher standard of living. While chided as being "little princes", these kids were more economically successful than their parents, and brought a new verve to the economy and culture. Suddenly, most Chinese came to believe that this was one of the secrets of Western success (which was always something of a mystery to the Chinese, who feel inherently superior to those smelly apes with the round eyes and bad manners.) In fact, economists, and other social scientists (the Chinese ones as well) always understood the value of small families. But getting over a billion Chinese to agree took a shock, and the one-child policy provided the needed nudge. But the cost is several generations of labor shortages and the growing fiscal and political costs of supporting a huge (especially by Chinese standards) number of elderly.
http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/china/articles/20110725.aspx
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Anders Behring Breivik said he was a boy when his life’s path began to turn. It was during the first Gulf War, when a Muslim friend cheered at reports of missile attacks against American forces.
“I was completely ignorant at the time and apolitical but his total lack of respect for my culture (and Western culture in general) actually sparked by interest and passion for it,” the suspect in Norway’s bombing and mass shooting wrote in his 1,500-page manifesto.
The 32-year-old Norwegian said it was the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 that “tipped the scales” for him because he sympathized with Serbia’s crackdown on ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.
Part of Breivik’s manifesto was taken almost word for word from the first few pages of the anti-technology manifesto written by “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who is in federal prison for mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others across the U.S. from the 1970s to the 1990s.
In Internet postings attributed to Breivik on Norwegian websites, he blamed Europe’s left-wing parties for destroying the continent’s Christian heritage by allowing mass immigration of Muslims.
Backgrounder: No father at home.
Breivik called his upbringing in a middle-class home in Oslo privileged even though his parents divorced when he was 1 and he lost contact with his father in his teens. His parents split when the family lived in London, where his father, Jens Breivik, was a diplomat at the Norwegian Embassy in London. A spokesman for the embassy, Stein Iversen, confirmed that Jens Breivik was employed at the embassy in the late 1970s, but wouldn’t discuss his relationship with the Oslo suspect.
Breivik said both parents supported Norway’s center-left Labor Party, which he viewed as infiltrated by Marxists.
His mother won a custody battle, but Breivik said he regularly visited his father and his new wife in France, where they lived, until his father cut off contact when Breivik was 15. The father told Norwegian newspaper VG that they lost touch in 1995, but that it was his son who wanted to cut off contact.
'The stimulus package failed because it was all over the map. It was not a targeted clear jobs creation program'
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/#ixzz1T82ZJa10
Burke Kenny, of Olympia in Washington state, has just returned from the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Trondheim, Norway. The competition featured 20 categories, with Americans bringing home six gold medals.
President Obama seems determined to use suffocating bureaucracy to bring Texas down with the rest of the country.
New unemployment claims rose this past week and total unemployment across the nation edged upward to 9.2 percent. The national economy simply isn't growing anywhere near as fast as President Obama claimed it would when he and the Democratic 110th Congress pumped $859 billion worth of stimulus into it. Job creation has all but ground to a halt in recent months. If the country is not at the precipice of the second dip in a double-dip recession, it clearly is in a jobless recovery.
The one bright spot in the national economic picture is Texas, which has an economy busting out all over with new jobs. Nearly half of the estimated quarter-million new jobs that have been created since February 2009 were created in Texas. But Obama seems determined to use suffocating bureaucracy to bring Texas down with the rest of the country.
Consider the excessive delays imposed on the energy industry in the Gulf of Mexico by Obama's Department of the Interior in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Other states border the Gulf, of course, but the Gulf region's energy industry is centered in Texas, so when the federal government stops issuing drilling permits and promulgates costly new regulations on drilling in the Gulf, Texas suffers most.
Also getting into Obama's anti-Texas act is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with its new Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. This rule is clearly designed to shut down coal-fired power plants in the nation's heartland. Because EPA is giving industry far too little time to adapt to the new rule, starting next year millions of people are going to have to make due with less electricity for air conditioning and heat. Lots of people will be put out of work as well.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2011/07/whats-obama-got-against-lone-star-state#ixzz1T7ysiK2G
BLACK MONDAY? Obama’s Debt-Ceiling Crisis Strategy Could Sink Wall Street.
Related: Poll: GOP Has 10-Point Edge Over Democrats In Public Trust On Economic Issues. “The 10 point lead is the widest margin held by either party in months and has opened up in recent weeks as President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have become the central players in the debate over how to deal with the approaching debt-ceiling crisis.”
“I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.”
AS CRIMINAL LAWS PROLIFERATE, more are ensnared.
“As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors don’t necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent. . . .
The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. By the turn of the 20th century, the number of criminal statutes numbered in the dozens. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a 2008 study by retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker. There are also thousands of regulations that carry criminal penalties. Some laws are so complex, scholars debate whether they represent one offense, or scores of offenses. Counting them is impossible. The Justice Department spent two years trying in the 1980s, but produced only an estimate.” Yet we retain the fiction that everyone is supposed to know the law.
I think ordinary citizens should enjoy the same “good faith immunity” that law enforcement officials enjoy. That they do not is, I suggest, a violation of the Constitutional injunction against titles of nobility. One thing that a title of nobility grants, after all, is exemption from laws that bedevil the little people.
Hmmm.
No revenue increases. Cuts in spending greater than an increase in the debt ceiling. A hike in the latter that will take the US well into 2013, enough to make deficit spending into a big 2012 election issue. Is this the latest from John Boehner and House Republicans? According to The Hill, it’s the latest from … Harry Reid?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Sunday he is drafting a $2.7 trillion deficit reduction package that would raise the debt ceiling through 2012 after he said talks on a bipartisan deal “broke down” again with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
The announcement raises the likelihood that the House and Senate will pursue separate proposals to lift the debt limit with just eight days to go before a potential U.S. default after Aug. 2. If both chambers passed their own bills this week, it would leave little time for the measures to be merged and sent to the president before the Treasury Department runs out of money.
Reid said his bill would meet the GOP’s criteria for approving a debt-ceiling increase: it would contain spending cuts that meet or exceed the additional authorization in federal borrowing, and it would not include new revenues – as Democrats have long demanded.
AP
Fox News/AP
