Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
MATTHEW YGLESIAS, - Slate
Stephan: Already the Theocratic Right has begun to espouse the same old policies that were rejected in the last election. I think it is very important we stay in touch with real data, not ideological and theological fantasies. Here is one example of what I mean, not from an ideologue from either side, but from a money person.
Click through to see the charts which make this all very clear.
Jed Graham at Investors Business Daily gives us a fact you don’t hear much about from Washington’s chorus of deficit scolds, the deficit is already going down at a very fast pace-the fastest rate since World War II demobilization.
This is the flipside of the huge increases in the deficit that were associated with the recession. An economic downturn activates a lot of ‘automatic stabilizers’-falling tax revenue and higher payouts for safety net programs. We also had the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Those rising deficits were used to sow a lot of panic, but their natural flipside is that as the economy strengthens and ARRA fades out the deficit falls rapidly. Throw in the spending cuts House Republicans got the White House to agree to last year, and you’ve got pretty rapid federal deleveraging.
I’d say that’s a net minus for the economy. But it’s something you’d think the budget hawk crowd would be cheering. But instead they’re sowing further panic about the ‘fiscal cliff.’
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Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
THOM HARTMANN and SAM SACKS, - Truthout.org
Stephan: I am following this story very closely because, if it holds up, it represents treason on a mass scale.
As laid out in the previous article, Anonymous, Karl Rove and the 2012 Election Fix?, it’s possible that Karl Rove used SmartTECH’s servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to flip the vote totals in Ohio in 2004 and thus steal the election that year for George W. Bush – and just as possible that he tried to do the same thing this year on Romney’s behalf but was thwarted by the hacktivist group Anonymous.
Many people have responded to these claims with a variation on: ‘That’s impossible. A presidential candidate committing treason? That would never happen, and, if it did, it would be front-page news. Everybody would know about it, right?’
Wrong.
Consider some simple history.
In 1952 Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency – and there’s not a hint of scandal associated with that election. Maybe that’s because he supported a 91% top marginal income tax rate on the rich and approved of very popular New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment benefits. As he told his brother in a letter in 1954, ‘Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in […]
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Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
DARIO BORGHINO, - Rice University
Stephan: Here is some more good news describing another breakthrough making non-carbon energy more attainable.
Click through to see the charts.
An open-access paper detailing this research effort was published in the journal ACS Nano.
A team of researchers at Rice University has developed a new technology that uses light-absorbing nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. Even though it is already significantly more efficient than solar panels at producing electricity, the technology will likely find its first applications in low-cost sanitation, water purification and human waste treatment for the developing world.
Approximately 90 percent of the world’s electricity is produced from steam turbines. Most industrial steam is produced in large, expensive boilers, but because of its very small footprint and high efficiency, this new development promises to make steam economically viable on a much smaller scale. Sterilizing medical waste and surgical instruments, preparing food and purifying water could soon become within reach of a large chunk of the developing world, that doesn’t have access to the electrical grid.
The Rice technology relies on light-absorbing nanoparticles. When they are submerged and then illuminated, these particles can very quickly reach temperatures well above the boiling point of water. At this stage, they quickly dissipate heat through their very small surface area, which almost instantly results in 150°C (300°F) steam generated right at the surface of the particle. The system is so effective that it can even turn […]
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
THOM HARTMANN and SAM SACKS, - Truthout.org
Stephan: About 40 of you have sent me variations of this story. I have held back for several days waiting to see the counter-story emerge. It has never appeared. That said if this holds up there should be a Congressional investigation, as well as a Justice Department investigation. If this account is validated Karl Rove and all those involved in this scummy scheme should be indicted, convicted, and sent to prison for a long time.
At around 11:25 pm EST on election night, Karl Rove knew something had gone terribly wrong.
Minutes earlier, Fox News called the key battleground state of Ohio for President Obama, sealing his re-election. But as the network took live shots of jubilant Obama supporters celebrating their victory camped outside the Obama re-election headquarters in Chicago, Karl Rove began building a case against the call his employer network had just made.
Rove explained that when Fox called Ohio, only 74% of the vote was in showing President Obama with a lead of roughly 30,000 votes. But, as Rove contended, with 77% reporting according to the Ohio Secretary of State office, the President’s lead had been slashed to just 991 votes.
‘We gotta be careful about calling the thing,
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
Stephan: Justice Aito attempts here to justify his vote on Citizens United. It astonishes me that someone on the highest court in the country can be this dumb. I don't think he is, and I do not think he is being candid. It is my belief that Citizens United resulted from a conscious decision on the part of five Justices to serve corporate interests. I can't prove it, but I find it impossible that it was not obvious that what has happened, would happen. It is particularly hypocritical for Alito and Scalia, who claim to be originalists, to have voted the way they did. The Founders had no idea corporations such as we have today would ever exist, and the Justices know this. Their actions are shameful.
Last week, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. speciously defended the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case by arguing that the ruling, which allowed unlimited independent campaign spending by corporations and unions, was not really groundbreaking at all. In fact, he said, all it did was reaffirm that corporations have free speech rights and that, without such rights, newspapers would have lost the major press freedom rulings that allowed the publication of the Pentagon Papers and made it easier for newspapers to defend themselves against libel suits in New York Times v. Sullivan.
‘The question is whether speech that goes to the very heart of government should be limited to certain preferred corporations; namely, media corporations,
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