Everything

In a budget plan put forth by the Obama administration, funding for NASA’s moon project would be cut. Under the plan, NASA would be phased out and turned over to commercial companies during the next six years. There has been an uproar over the abandonment of such a successful science program.

“The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight,” said Senator Richard Shelby, member of the appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding.

“Congress cannot and will not sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human space flight program,” said Shelby of Alabama, whose home state has NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

This is how a centrally planned (ha!) economy does it:

“Interest rates as low as 2 percent for bank loans — the result of a savings rate of 40 percent and a government policy of steering loans to renewable energy”

“The Chinese government charges a renewable energy fee to all electricity users. The fee increases residential electricity bills by 0.25 percent to 0.4 percent. For industrial users of electricity, the fee doubled in November to roughly 0.8 percent of the electricity bill. ”

“The fee revenue goes to companies that operate the electricity grid, to make up the cost difference between renewable energy and coal-fired power.”

“Under legislation passed by the Chinese legislature on Dec. 26, a grid operator that does not connect a renewable energy operation to the grid must pay that operation twice the value of the electricity that cannot be distributed.”

Read all about it:China eats your green lunch

The right thing for the wrong reasons. The USA is hated in the Middle East, and this emotion is exacerbated by the presence of US troops in Iraq. Should have happened years ago. In fact, should never have been there in the first place. The US dropped the ball in Afghanistan, went off sideways to opportunistic war in Iraq, one that it did not need and could not afford.Time to Leave

Free speech means unlimited campaign contributions. So step right up, which politician do you want to buy today ? The Supreme Court of the USA is now unabashedly right wing, and decisions like these are why campaign reforms die stillborn.

Sold!

For some more detail:Supreme Court Unleashes Corporate Campaign Cash

No, not the aliens. Asian carp have reached the Great Lakes.

DNA of an Invasion

“Clearly this is not good news” says the US Army Corps of Engineers.

So wepoison the water…

For years the FBI circumvented laws in order to eavesdrop on citizens of the USA. Including reporters. Including phone calls twice and three times removed from the original suspect. Including making up nonexistent cases. Including blanket justifications with no specifics available.

All your calls are mediated by Big Brother and the Ministry of Love.

Color me unsurprised.

Read all about it:
All Your Phone Calls

The bankers own Washington. The politicians wear knee pads.

“Deregulation would help Rubin earn over $100 million in the following decade. ”

“If you get Chuck Schumer on your side, you are okay,”
“so much money from Wall Street over the years—more than $14 million”

And that’s just small change.

“Not even the Mafia has a vig like that.”

No… the bankers are worse than the Mob.

Who owns your representatives ?

“The defense lobby? Pikers. They contributed $24 million to individuals and PACs during the last election cycle. The farm lobby? $65 million. Health care? We’re getting warmer. Health care was the No. 2 industry, at $167 million.”

“And the finance lobby? They’re No. 1, with a very, very big bullet. They contributed an astonishing $475 million during the 2008 election cycle. That’s up from $60 million almost two decades ago.”

“$500 million on political contributions in just a single election”

“the financial industry spent $402 million in the first 10 months of 2009″

The government of the USA is bought and paid for. If you are not too big to fail, you don’t exist. Of course, you could try buying a local politician or three.

This Land is Their Land

“the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system” in the USA has “pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.” citing “intractable institutional and structural obstacles”

The article continues:
“What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.”

After all those exonerations based on shoddy police and presecutorial work, and DNA evidence, the deep and evident racial disparity in the recipients of death penalties, they only now have the courage to say this ?

“capital punishment is plagued by racial disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections”

If judges are elected, they will pander to the electorate. Is any of this so hard to understand ” I suppose so, for hidebound and vindictive creatures exemplified here:

“Mr. Scheidegger expressed satisfaction that an effort to have the institute come out against the death penalty as such was defeated.”

Have such men no shame ? And worse, have they no compassion ? No mercy in their souls ?

I suppose not.

From the article:

“the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”

Killing Grounds

If you remove the harvests from a farm, year after year and decade after decade, the soil will degenerate to the point that your harvest is nonexistent. The fruits must return to the soil, else you will create a desert. This point is nicely explained in the article below.

From the Soil and Back

The first case of contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis was fond in the United States. It is called “extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB”.

“Drug resistance is starting to be a very big problem. In the past, people stopped worrying about TB and it came roaring back. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We are all connected by the air we breathe, and that is why this must be everyone’s problem.”

In 2007, the CDC put out this report:

U.S. Tuberculosis Cases at All-Time Low; Drug Resistance Remains a Threat
Tuberculosis rates in the United States reached an all-time low in 2006, though progress to eliminate TB continued to slow. Drug-resistant TB, including extensively drug-resistant TB, presents significant challenges to treatment and control of the disease in the United States and abroad, according to articles in today’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

“Tuberculosis continues to have a significant and unacceptable impact on minorities and immigrant communities in the United States,” said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention. “Blacks and Hispanics have tuberculosis rates that are about eight times higher than that of whites, and the rate for Asians is more than 21 times that of whites. Foreign-born individuals living in the United States have nearly 10 times the rate of TB as those born in the United States.”

A total of 13,767 TB cases were reported in the United States in 2006, down from 14,085 cases in 2005. The 2006 national TB case rate – 4.6 cases per 100,000 persons – was the lowest since reporting began in 1953. However, the decline of 3.2 percent in the national TB case rate from 2005 to 2006 was one of the smallest in more than a decade. Overall the average annual decline in the national TB rate slowed from 7.3 percent per year in the period 1993-2000 to 3.8 percent per year in the period 2000-2006.

Persons living with TB also continue to be severely impacted by HIV. Among TB cases with a documented HIV test result, 12.4 percent were HIV-infected.

Multidrug resistant TB (MDR TB) is TB that is resistant to at least two first line therapies – isoniazid and rifampin. Extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR TB) is TB resistant to at least isoniazid and rifampin among the first-line anti-TB drugs and among second-line drugs, is resistant to any fluoroquinolone and at least one of three injectable drugs. Drug-resistant TB is difficult and costly to treat and can be fatal.

“Tuberculosis that is resistant to many of the standard drugs used to treat the disease challenges our ability to treat and control TB,” Dr. Fenton said. “In the United States, we have made great progress since the early 1990s against TB that is resistant to multiple first line treatments and had seen declines in these cases. Recently however, our success against MDR TB has slowed.”

XDR TB renders patients virtually untreatable with available drugs, particularly those in areas with less access to the full range of effective drugs. CDC’s new analysis, which includes provisional data for 2006, found that between 1993 and 2006, there were 49 XDR TB cases in the United States reported to the CDC.

XDR TB continues to be widely distributed geographically in the United States and abroad, causing public health concern. The risk of XDR TB appears to be low in the United States. However, due to the ease with which TB can spread, XDR TB will continue to pose a serious risk to the United States as long as it exists anywhere else in the world.

“CDC and its domestic and international partners are taking many steps to prevent further spread of drug-resistant TB and to reduce the overall burden of the disease,” said Dr. Ken Castro, director of CDC’s Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. “These efforts include developing new treatment regimens, increasing the capacity of health professionals to provide effective treatment, and issuing new recommendations for improved screening and treatment for U.S. immigrants.”

For more information about the reports in today’s MMWR, visit www.cdc.gov/mmwr. For information about tuberculosis, visit http://www.cdc.gov/nchstp/tb/default.htm.

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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES