text:
It's the Fourth times three in West Allis
Three-day celebration begins with parade and ends with fireworks
West Allis - West Allis salutes the Fourth of July with a celebration spanning three days.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Marching Band will add its toe-tapping magic to the Independence Day parade on the first of those days, July 2. The parade will run along Greenfield Avenue from 77th to 70th streets, ending at Veterans Park at 70th and National Avenue. The procession will be studded with 11 bands.
Afterwards, the UW Marching Band will give a special post-parade performance that will be a highlight of the communitywide celebration in the park. The party in the park will feature children's carnival games, the Fire Department water games, the Police Department Moon Walk, inflatables, a rock climbing wall and live music and food.
July 3 features the Breakfast of Champions - honoring scholars, athletes and musicians. The event also will include a silent auction.
State Fair Park will be the locale for festivities on the Fourth of July. The Kids from Wisconsin will give a special performance at 7:30 p.m. There also will be guest speakers and patriotic music performed by the West Allis Lancer Band. At 9:30 p.m. the fireworks create a spectacular climax to the three-day celebration.
Three days of celebrating in West Allis:
Monday, July 2
6 p.m. - Judging and prizes Centennial Park Plaza at City Hall, 7525 W. Greenfield Ave., for the best coaster wagon, costume, hat and bicycle decorating for children up to age 12.
7 p.m. - Independence Day Parade; with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Marching Band, drill teams and 11 bands marching along Greenfield Avenue from 77th to 70th, ending at Veterans Park at 70th and National Avenue.
8 to 10 p.m. - Post-parade community celebration at Veterans Memorial Park, 70th and National; featuring a performance by the UW Marching Band, children's carnival games, water games, Moon Walk, inflatables, rock climbing wall, live music and food.
Tuesday, July 3
8 a.m. - Breakfast of Champions at City Hall, Centennial Park Plaza, honoring scholars, musicians and athletes, silent auction
Wednesday, July 4
7:30 p.m. - Performance by the Kids from Wisconsin, speakers, patriotic music by the West Allis Lancer Band at Wisconsin State Fair grandstand
9:30 p.m. - Fireworks
This site uses Facebook comments to make it easier for you to contribute. If you see a comment you would like to flag for spam or abuse, click the "x" in the upper right of it. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use.
E-mail Newsletter
Your link to the biggest stories in the suburbs delivered Thursday mornings.
Enter your e-mail address above and click "Sign Up Now!" to begin receiving your e-mail newsletter Get the Newsletter!
More from News and Features
- Speakers split evenly on West Allis proposed sewer lateral program
- Where is West Allis education headed?
- West Allis to start process to approve new city administrator
- West Allis residents may voice opinions on self-funded sewer lateral 'insurance'
- Studio players bring Jekyll and Hyde to life
- Pawn America in West Allis retains license to operate
- West Allis Police Report: Oct. 9, 2014
- Interactive: Some West Allis schools fell in their state report cards
- mw_calendar_1009.now.com
- Exhibit at West Allis art and performance studio reflects scary season


text: Judge to Carney: Bulger trial date remains 'firm' By: David Frank October 5, 2012 As usual, things got a little testy during the James "Whitey" Bulger status conference in U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler's courtroom today. Tensions at the packed proceeding were running as high as they've been at any point since Bulger was apprehended last summer. The issue today came down to whether defense attorneys J.W. Carney Jr. ... Subscribe Login Email Address: Password: Already a paid subscriber but not registered for online access yet? For instructions on how to get premium web access, click here.Forgot your password? Share this:EmailPrintFacebookLinkedInTwitterGoogle +1 5:00 pm Fri, October 5, 2012 Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly David Frank

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Written by:
Mac Donald
Bracken breached hawthorn hedgerows
hide teeny folk with tiny toes.
Sheer gossamer wings; shy butterflies
Dew-drops lit by dawning skies.
Sandy hair, blue raven locks
Auburn streaks on chestnut stalks
Valley lilies invert to hats
Wee portabella mushroom caps.
Acorn shoes with resin soles
Lace gartered legs and leafy shawls
Dresses spun from brushed lime silk,
petal pinks, or white as milk.
Impish grins stoke laughing smiles.
whimsy's sound sets music's tiles
Curious eyes, small budded nose
cream tinted skin, pink cheeks aglow.
They live near boles of ancient trees
Drink nectar from a hollowed seed
They climb the stems of hollyhocks
They twitter but will rarely talk.
So when you take a morning stroll
pause beside to a sun-lit knoll
The calls you hear mightn't be birds
and cricket strums won't mimic words.


text:
Dr. Joseph M. Freiberg, MD
Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, Joseph M Freiberg MD
- 4499 Medical Dr Ste 240
San Antonio, TX 78229
- 1 Office Location
- Email a Friend
- (210) 614-9255
Dr. Joseph M. Freiberg has been practicing medicine for 47 years. Dr. Freiberg graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine in 1967. He practices medicine in San Antonio, TX and specializes in Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism and Internal Medicine. Dr. Freiberg is affiliated with Methodist Specialty & Transplant Hospital, Methodist Hospital, St Lukes Baptist Hospital and Christus Santa Rosa Hospital-New Braunfels. He speaks English and Spanish.
Gender: Male
Years in Practice: 47 Years
Languages Spoken: English, Spanish
Medical School: University of Kentucky College of Medicine
Graduation Date: 1967
Hospital Affiliations: Methodist Specialty & Transplant Hospital, Methodist Hospital, St Lukes Baptist Hospital, Christus Santa Rosa Hospital-New Braunfels
Specialties: Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, Internal Medicine
©2005-2014 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.
WebMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. See additional information.


text:
taking a dump in the woods while someone is giving you a blowjob
7 days of camping with no showers. And the last day my girl gave me a wild blumpkin. She came out looking like she ate a bag of dirt.
ayon kay aaron gilmore ika-19 ng Hulyo, 2010
nagte- trend
klase o uri


text:
Photographed by: Sam Lim
2 Succulent Dishes from Savoy Bistro prepared by Chef Robert Lilja.
(left) Gravlax Salmon Roe served with Sour Cream and Dill Mustard Sauce topped with Herring Caviar from Sweden
(right) Mussels and Co. served with White Wine and Cream
Ummm ummmm! Need I say more?
- zosia24 reblogged this from samlim
- sofiz24 likes this
- unbeknownstlove reblogged this from samlim
- aperture24 likes this
- omgiseefood reblogged this from samlim
- mallsplendour reblogged this from samlim
- nalava likes this
- laceci answered: any tip for this kind of pics?
- laceci likes this
- photopa3k likes this
- acterrenal likes this
- akkin24 likes this
- justinhalbert likes this
- samlim posted this


text:
- Advice
- Games
- Toys
- Entertainment
- School Stuff
- Sports
LOCAL VANCOUVER KIDS WEBSITE TAKING LITERACY OFFLINE IN COMMUNITYDec 20, 2010
Kidzworld is taking its core values offline and back into the community with a number of initiatives this holiday season including one aimed at increasing literacy amongst children who are struggling with reading in Vancouver and North Vancouver.
Union Gospel Mission Toy DonationDec 14, 2010
Kidzworld recently made a large donation of brand-new, never-used toys, books and video games to Vancouver's Union Gospel Mission (UGM) for its Gifts of Hope Christmas Hamper program.
What is Your Favorite Holiday?Dec 05, 2010
Singing songs, wearing costumes, giving gifts, eating candy, playing games... how do you like to celebrate the holdays! Take this quiz to find out what holiday is your favorite...
Kidzworld's Holiday Gift Guide 2010Nov 26, 2010
Kidzworld's 2010 Holiday Gift Guide! Find the prefect gift for your friends and loved ones!
Don't Be A Scrooge- Holiday Tips!Nov 16, 2010
Walt Disney Pictures retells the beloved tale – Disney's A Christmas Carol, the high-flying, heartwarming adventure for the whole family. We have tips to help you spend wisely on gifts entertaining with ease!
The Legend of FrankensteinOct 30, 2010
The legend of Frankenstein is one of the most gruesome stories ever imagined. This giant monster is made out of body parts stolen from the graveyard, sewn together by a mad scientist in a laboratory, and finally he is brought to life by electricity. Do not try this at home with your "coach potato" brother, mother or father.
The Legend of ZombiesOct 30, 2010
It's time to talk about the Legend of Zombies. Like the Mummy, zombies are a lumbering, staggering, Halloween and horror presence. Quite annoying actually … be sure not to get bitten by one as they are very contagious!
The Legend of MummiesOct 29, 2010
It's time to take a trip to Egypt and explore the tombs of the pyramids… we're going to look into the legend of mummies. Now don't get scared because mummies are slow and old. They have been decaying for hundreds… no wait, even thousands of years, so if you ever encounter a mummy, one quick Kung Fu kick will probably send them into oblivion.
Top 10 Scary PranksOct 28, 2010
Halloween is open season to pull all your scariest pranks on your friends and family. Here are Kidzworld's Top 10 pranks to pull on Halloween!
The Legend of WitchesOct 28, 2010
It's time to learn about the legend of witches! "Mix blood of owl with the herb that's red… Turn three times, pluck a hair from my head… A leaf of a crocus, an ear of a hog… hocus pocus, you're a frog!" Well, this isn't a real witchcraft, but if you are craving a mosquito, please send us an email and we'll look into the spell reversal.
The Legend of WerewolvesOct 27, 2010
AROOooooooooh… it's time to talk about the legend of the werewooooooolf! If your little bratty brother has been biting you and making weird noises past midnight, you might want to check on him to make sure he's not a werewolf! Werewolves are regular people during the day, but at night they turn into havoc reeking monsters on the prowl.
The Legend of VampiresOct 25, 2010
One of the spookiest characters is the vampire. This sneaky, dark, blood-sucking demon is the scariest character out of all the Halloween monsters. So beware: keep reading at your own risk! Or, you might have a hard time sleeping tonight!
What should you be for Halloween?Oct 25, 2010
Are you having a tough time deciding what to be for Halloween? Take this quiz and find out what costume you should make for Halloween...
Top 10 Haunted HousesOct 20, 2010
Strange noises are the most common clues that a house is haunted. But… for a house to make the Kidzworld Top 10 Most Haunted Houses, there's got to be some more freaky things going on. Find out what makes the most famous haunted houses the spookiest places in the World
Top 10 Most Famous GhostsOct 16, 2010
Do you believe in ghosts? A lot of people claim to see and hear ghosts all over the world. Who know?! Maybe there are ghosts everywhere. There are a lot of stories that might make you a believer. Here are Kidzworld's Top 10 Most Famous Ghosts.
Top 10 Spooky MoviesOct 14, 2010
If you're planning a Halloween Slumber Party, line up some spooky movies that you can watch while you munch on your candy. Kidzworld has selected the Top 10 spooky movies to watch on Halloween!
Crafting Mama: Halloween Pumpkin Carving ContestSep 17, 2010
Mama returns in an entirely new experience that will challenge your creativity! Enter Kidzworld's Crafting Mama Halloween Pumpkin Carving Contest!!
Gift Certificates for DadJun 11, 2010
Dads sure can be tricky to buy for! When you ask what they want for Father's Day, they say clean your room or stop fighting with your brother! Here's our list of the best gift certificates to get dads that are impossible to shop for!
Green Gifts for DadJun 11, 2010
If your dad is totally committed to saving the environment – or if you want him to start trying a bit harder to recycle his empty cans – check out our list of the Top 5 Green Gifts for Dad!
Celebrate LIFE This Father's DayJun 11, 2010
With Father's Day rapidly approaching, it's time to shine the spotlight on the dad's of the animal kingdom. The groundbreaking natural history series -- LIFE


text:
Be the first to review this item
This item is no longer available
This item ships for FREE with 2-Day Shipping on orders over $50. (Details)
Want it delivered on Mon, Nov 3? Order in-stock items in the next 1 day 11 hrs 5 mins and choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.
Shipping Weight:
1.8 pounds
Package Size: 9.2 x 6.6 x 2.7 inches
The Hanna Instruments HI 9811-5N is a waterproof multi-parameter meter for measuring electro-conductivity (EC), Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), pH, and temperature all in one device.
The meter features a large LCD screen for readability, and automatic temperature compensation to eliminate the need for additional calculations. The meter can be calibrated at one point for pH, EC or TDS.
pH range is 0.0 to 14.0 pH, + or - 0.1 pH, with resolution 0.1 pH. EC range is 0 to 6000 uS/cm + or - 2% F.S. with resolution 10 uS/cm. TDS range is 0 to 3000 ppm (mg/L) + or - 2% F.S. with resolution 10 ppm (mg/L).Temperature range is 0.0 to 70.0°C, + or - 1 degree C, with resolution 0 degree C. Dimensions are 144.6 x 79.5 x 37 mm (5.7 x 3.1 x 1.5") and weighs 230 g (8.1 oz.).
Conductivity meters are used for measuring the electro-conductivity of a solution. They are commonly used in hydroponics, aquaculture, and research to measure the amount of salts or other compounds present in water.
Hanna Instruments manufactures a wide variety of analytical instrumentation, including pH meters, multi-parameter meters, electrodes, chemical reagents, and buffer solutions. Founded in 1978, Hanna is headquartered in Woonsocket, RI, with subsidiaries in 32 countries. Hanna Instruments holds many firsts in the field of analytical instrumentation, including a pH electrode with a built-in temperature sensor, an electronic pocket-sized pH tester, and a replaceable electrode pH pocket tester. To ensure the quality of its products, Hanna is a vertically integrated manufacturer and does not subcontract any part of its manufacturing.
What's in the Box?
How can we improve our Product Description?
There are no customer reviews yet.Be the first to review this item


text:
This bundle includes everything you need to rapidly develop a fully working Datalogger system based on the PIC microcontroller ECIO board, which presents an extremely easy way to build PC interfaces. All circuit diagrams for the boards are supplied, which allows you to develop your own circuit board after having prototyped your system with the E-Blocks.
The kit includes the following:
Please follow the links to those individual product pages for more information about each component in this kit.
Flowcode 6 includes a full USB pack for rapid design of USB slave systems, USB serial port replication, and USB Human Interface Device development. The combination of Flowcode with the ECIO means that you can develop systems that are fully USB reprogrammable in the field, and are ready to communicate with a PC.


text:
Mike Miller has been with the Grizzlies for a total of seven seasons making him one of the franchise's longest tenured players. His first six years with the team were from '02-'08 and his seventh was just this past year when they brought him back. Oh, and bringing him back this past year was one of the best moves the Grizzlies could have made.
The Grizzlies scoring output this past year was dismal at best. This was in large part due to injuries, as Mike Conley, Marc Gasol, Tony Allen, Courtney Lee, and Quincy Pondexter all missed time. With those players being gone throughout various points of the season, there was one player who played in all 82 games: Mike Miller. Yes, THE Mike Miller who hadn't played 82 games since his rookie year in 2000. He had struggled with injuries throughout his entire career, but this year he had perfect attendance. You might be thinking, "Okay, so what? He played every game, but the Grizzlies still couldn't score." This is true, but you have to remember that his role has been limited (20 mpg last year) as he ages. At this point in his career he isn't going to be able to carry the scoring load like he did back in '06-'07, but his value now is how he is utilized off the bench.
What exactly does Miller bring off the bench? Yes he does score, but not abundantly (7.1 ppg last season). What he does do is score efficiently. This is something that the Grizzlies really struggled to do as a team, which led to their 27th ranking in points per game.
Fun fact: Mike Miller is 18th all-time in three point percentage. Top 20 in NBA history. That's pretty impressive especially when you consider that it's higher than both Ray Allen and Dell Curry. Having someone that you can send onto the floor and have him make a three pointer 45.9% of the time(his percentage last year) is a very valuable asset on a team that doesn't shoot well as a whole. Miller was not only an important part the team statistically last year, but he was a leader as well.
The problem is that there is only one Mike Miller. There are other players who play a similar style though, and the Grizzlies need to pick up a few more. High efficiency scorers who can stretch the floor are essential in the NBA today. That being said, you absolutely need to pair efficient shooting with good defense. The Grizz have the defense part down, but again, the scoring is lacking.
You look at the Spurs model and see what type of players they have. San Antonio currently has six players who shot over 40% from beyond the arc last year. This stretches the floor for Tim Duncan down low, and it also opens up lanes for Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. The team is also excellent defensively, and it seems to work pretty well as they are currently in the finals.
Memphis, on the other hand, had three players who shot over 40% from beyond the arc, and two of them didn't combine to play 82 games (Jon Leuer and Jamaal Franklin). You need to combine excellent defense and offensive efficiency to win in the NBA. The Grizzlies shooting percentages were far too low, and we know what happened as a result.
All this comes to back to #13, Mike Miller. Miller is a free agent going into the off-season, and I believe that one of the Grizzlies top priorities should be bringing him back on a veteran's minimum (or similar) contract. He will give you two things that you desperately need: Three point shooting efficiency and leadership. Keep Z-Bo, Gasol, Conley, Allen, and the core together. Add some other efficient shooters a la the Spurs, and this could be a very dangerous team going into next year.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is the fact that the Grizzlies need to bring back Miller. He will be an essential part of the team this upcoming season, and hopefully with a few other additions, the Grizzlies can get it done.
Tags: Memphis Grizzlies Mike Miller


text:
Niagara Chiropractors
In the interest of providing a comprehensive directory, we have listed their names, addresses and phone numbers. If you have a business located in Niagara that should be listed on this page, click here for information on getting listed in The Niagara Health Guide.
Please choose a Health Service or Product from the lists below.


text:
Policy Institutes
Immigration's Real Impact on Wages and Employment
Alex Nowrasteh
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has been releasing a series of reports claiming that immigrants are benefiting from the slightly recovering job market while natives are not. Of course, if immigrants were even less likely to gain jobs than Americans, CIS would use that as evidence that immigrants are a drain on the economy. No matter.
The implicit assumption in CIS' publications is that if those millions of immigrants weren't working in the United States, more native-born Americans would have jobs – a static view of the economy. CIS' fixed pie implication is inappropriate to any kind of reasonable economic analysis of the effects of immigration on the labor market. That is the primary reason why labor economists do not use CIS' methods when attempting to measure the labor market impacts of immigration. Even if CIS' numbers were compiled correctly, they are not measuring anything useful.
A large body of academic economic research has found that immigration has a relatively small effect on U.S-born American wages and their employment prospects. For wages impact, the estimates are that immigrants either lower the wages of some American workers by about 2 percent or raise them by about 2 percent in a dynamic economy (this, this, and this). The employment effects vary little but, like wages, the effects are small and clustered around zero. Nowhere will you find a tradeoff where one additional immigrants means that one American loses a job in the economy.
The CIS papers make no counterfactual dynamic economic estimates of the strength of the labor market without immigrants.
Here are some additional facts you won't see in CIS' papers:
Unemployment rates for the native born and immigrants move in the same direction with a correlation coefficient of 0.92. Immigrants and natives tend to cluster in different occupations but the unemployment rate for both groups is very similar over time. They both respond to a growing or shrinking labor market.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Employed adult immigrants as a percent of all adult employed workers has edged up from about 15 percent in 2005 to about 16 percent in 2014. Employed adult natives as a percent of all employed adults declined from about 85 percent in 2005 to about 84 percent in 2014.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
The job market also looks pretty poor for all workers.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Most employment gains since 2010, the depths of the Great Recessions, have gone to natives. But immigrants have also done pretty well considering their lower percentage of the population and workforce. There are several reasons why this could be true. Immigrants are much less likely to have access to unemployment insurance and other means tested welfare programs, so their reserve wages are lower – meaning they're willing to re-enter the labor force for a lower wage rather than stay unemployed. Welfare discincentivizes some unemployed Americans from reentering the workforce. And Immigrants are more mobile than similarly skilled native-born workers.
A new NBER working paper by Brain C. Cadena and Brian K. Kovak observed that low skilled workers were disproportionately affected by job losses during the Great Recession and are typically the least mobile workers – meaning they do not move very far for new low skilled job openings. They found no measurable shift in the local supply of native-born low skilled workers with a high school degree or less in response to declines in the number of local jobs. Low skilled Mexican born workers are the exception – they are the most mobile workers in the United States. Between 2006 and 2010, Cadena and Kovak found that a 10 percentage point larger employment decline drove a 7.6 percentage point larger decline in population for Mexican workers in local labor markets, all else remaining equal. The same employment decline drove a 5.3 percentage point decline in local population for highly skilled workers. As discussed already, the native low skilled population did not move in response to changes in the local labor market.
Mobility is influenced by the availability of welfare benefits, but many immigrant are self-selected for mobility – they did move here from another country after all so they are less tied down to any particular region of the United States. Immigrant labor mobility smoothens labor markets over geographical areas and has other benefits, and it likely explains some of their job gains.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Unauthorized immigrants are very mobile workers. If they come from geographically closer places like Mexico or Latin America then they can respond very rapidly to changes in the U.S. labor market. They are then very mobile once they arrive in the United States. The stock of unauthorized immigrants peaked in 2007 before the Great Recession and dipped after that as the unemployment rate for immigrants rose (-0.42 correlation coefficient). By the way, the worst period for native job growth occurred during the period when the number of unauthorized immigrants also declined. If immigrants really did substantially decrease employment opportunities for Americans, we wouldn't see that effect.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Pew Research
The CIS papers do not attempt any type of regression analyses or to analyze the effects of immigration on a dynamic labor market. What would happen to the labor market if millions of immigrant workers, consumers, and entrepreneurs disappeared? The CIS report sheds zero light on that despite a vast peer-reviewed academic economics literature that finds immigrants are attracted to growing economies and improve them once they arrive.
More Headaches in Obamacare Open Enrollment
Nicole Kaeding
Open enrollment for Obamacare's second year begins in two months. Recent reports suggest that this year's enrollment period will not be a smooth process.
According to Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press, individuals face many hurdles in signing up for or renewing coverage:
- For the roughly 8 million people who signed up this year, the administration has set up automatic renewal. But consumers who go that route may regret it. They risk sticker shock by missing out on lower-premium options. And they could get stuck with an outdated and possibly incorrect government subsidy. Automatic renewal should be a last resort, consumer advocates say.
- An additional 5 million people or so will be signing up for the first time on HealthCare.gov and state exchange websites. But the Nov. 15-Feb. 15 open enrollment season will be half as long the 2013-2014 sign-up period, and it overlaps with the holiday season.
- Of those enrolled this year, the overwhelming majority received tax credits to help pay their premiums. Because those subsidies are tied to income, those 6.7 million consumers will have to file new forms with their 2014 tax returns to prove they got the right amount. Too much subsidy and their tax refunds will be reduced. Too little, and the government owes them.
- Tens of millions of people who remained uninsured this year face tax penalties for the first time, unless they can secure an exemption.
These won't be the only issues. In July, the Government Accountability Office told Congress that the HealthCare.gov website is still not complete. The back-end system that links the website to insurers and distributes the subsidies is not operational. Additionally, thousands, possibly millions, of insurance policies will be cancelled over the next several months for not including all of Obamacare's mandates which will increase the confusion for individuals.
The Obama administration says that this year's open enrollment period will be better than the last, but the complexity and short enrollment period will still create lots of headaches for consumers. Shockingly, overhauling a large swath of the United States economy is not easy work.
War Powers in the Bush-Obama Era
Gene Healy
Over at the National Interest, I have a piece examining President Obama's claim, in his nationally televised address Wednesday night, that "I have the authority to address the threat from ISI[S]."
Just where he's supposed to get that authority isn't clear—even to the Obama administration itself. In the last week, Obama officials have invoked (1) the War Powers Resolution, (2) the 2002 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq, and (3) the AUMF that Congress passed three days after 9/11. Any AUMF in a storm, it seems.
As I explain in the article, not one of those claims survives a good-faith reading of the relevant legislative text. The WPR specifically forecloses any interpretation that it grants the president a "free pass" for elective bombing. And invoking the 2001 or 2002 AUMF for a new war against a new enemy over a decade later is the sort of statute-stretching that makes using TARP to bail out car companies look timid by comparison.
You could describe the president's approach as "three bad arguments in search of a theme." Near as I can discern it, that theme is, "I'm not George W. Bush."
Apparently, it's very important to Barack Obama to make clear that he doesn't subscribe to the Congress-be-damned, I'm the "Decider" approach of his predecessor. Justifying war on a pure presidential power theory is for bad people like Dick Cheney and John Yoo, the legal architect of the Bush-Cheney "Terror Presidency."
Obama's nothing like that, he'll have you know. He's the guy who told us on the campaign trail that "The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers," and affirmed that the president lacks the power to launch military attacks absent an "actual or imminent threat to the nation." (His eventual veep, Joe Biden, went further, promising to "impeach [Bush] if he takes the nation to war against Iran without congressional approval.")
And yet, it's hard to escape the echoes of Obama's predecessor in Wednesday night's speech, from his case for preventive war against an enemy that "if left unchecked… could pose a growing threat beyond that region—including to the United States," to his promise to "support Iraq's efforts to stand up National Guard Units" (When they stand up, we will stand down). As John Yoo himself said last week: "Obama has adopted the same view of war powers as the Bush administration."
Tortured, bad-faith constructions of authorization passed by past Congresses for different wars can't hide that underlying reality. Obama may not be George W. Bush, but he's doing a pretty decent imitation.
Should Scotland Reclaim Its Independence?
David Boaz
At USA Today, I write about Scottish independence, which the Scottish people will vote on this coming Thursday. I note that the late Nobel laureate Gary Becker wrote in 2005, like Simon Lester today, that the disadvantages of small nations are much reduced in a world of free trade:
My conclusion is that developments in the global economy during the past 50 years have greatly reduced the economic disadvantages of small nations enumerated for his time by Hamilton. In fact, being small now may even have efficiency advantages…. [As trade barriers have come down over the past half-century,] small countries can now gain the advantages of large markets through trading with other nations.
I go over arguments on currency, tax rates, and the likelihood that an independent Scotland could be as socialist as some of its political leaders would like if it has to create its own prosperity. In the end, I write:
In any case, the economic arguments will go on till the vote on September 18. Scotland certainly has the elements necessary to be a successful European country. The real question is whether the Scots themselves desire, to borrow an Irish anthem, "that Scotland long a province be/A nation once again." As a descendant of Scots who helped America secure its independence, I hope so.
I wrote previously about Scottish independence here.
Scottish Independence: Not That Big a Deal in Today's World
Simon Lester
Yesterday, my colleague Doug Bandow blogged about Scottish independence, concluding with the following: "Whatever the Scots choose on September 18, Americans should wish them well." I just wanted to add a quick point here, drawing on something law professor Eric Posner said on this issue: "the benefits of a large country—mainly, security and a large internal market—are of diminishing significance in a world of free trade and relative peace."
To me, this is a very important consideration. If Scottish independence meant an increased chance of war or high tariffs designed to separate the Scottish market from the rest of the world, it would be worrying. But those seem unlikely. In terms of war and peace, there have been no Mel Gibson sightings that I'm aware of. On trade, there may be some bureaucratic challenges, but it seems clear the goal is for Scotland to join the EU and be part of its large, single market. As for trade with the rest of the world, Scotland will take on the EU's trade policy–which is not perfect of course–but has followed the trend toward liberalization that the rest of the world has pursued over the past few decades. In all likelihood, Scotland will continue to search for export markets for its whisky and allow the free flow of imports.
If Scottish independence meant it would become like North Korea, I'd be concerned. But it doesn't seem like that's the path it is on. With the exception of a few regions, we live in a highly integrated, peaceful world. Scottish independence would not change that.
Argentina: Down The Tubes, Again
Steve H. Hanke
President Christina Fernández de Kirchner has turned up her left-wing rhetoric as the economy goes down the tubes. Indeed, GDP has contracted for the past two quarters; inflation is galloping at 56%, not the official 15.01%; and the country has defaulted on its debt, again. Never mind. The President claims Argentina's financial system is "one of the most solid in the world." She asserts that Argentina's woes can be laid squarely at the feet of foreign "vulture funds" and greedy capitalists who have speculated against the peso. Yes, the peso has lost 42.6% of its value against the U.S. dollar on the black market since the first of the year, and for very legitimate reasons.
But, for realists like me, a fact check is always worth a peso. Recently, Bloomberg's Charlie Devreux and Pablo Gonzales penned some most edifying reportage on one thing that's booming in Argentina: criminality. Bandits have put cargos of grain headed for the port of Rosario in their crosshairs. And why not – grain is traded in greenbacks, not pesos.
Property's worst enemy is theft: theft makes property insecure. And unless property is secure, it can't be accumulated and it is wasted. The increasing incidence of heists on grain, Argentina's most valuable export, indicates that property rights are becoming more insecure and that the economy only has one way to go: down the tubes.
Indonesia Reform, Please
Steve H. Hanke
The Indonesian stock market has just hit a record high on the hope that the incoming President, Joko Widodo, will push through economic reforms. But, what path should he follow? My advice to President Widodo is the same as that I gave President Suharto, when I was his advisor in 1998: follow Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew.
When Singapore gained independence in 1965, Lee Kuan Yew developed a set of sound principles, which proved to be highly successful. Indeed, their implementation propelled Singapore to the top of the world's competitiveness rankings. I have dubbed these principles the "Singapore Strategy." It contains the following five elements:
- First and foremost, stabilize the currency. Singapore achieved stability with a currency board system – a simple, transparent, rule-driven monetary regime.
- Second, don't pass the begging bowl. Singapore refused to accept foreign aid of any kind.
- Third, foster first-world, competitive, private enterprises. Singapore accomplished this via light taxation, light regulation, and completely open and free trade.
- Fourth, emphasize personal security, public order, and the protection of private property.
- The final key to Lee Kuan Yew's "Singapore Strategy" is the means to accomplish the previous four goals: a small, transparent government that avoids complexity and red tape. And one that is directed by first-class civil servants who are paid first-class wages.
Bennett Piece Exemplifies Core Problems
Neal McCluskey
This morning, former Reagan administration education secretary Bill Bennett took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to make the "conservative" case for the Common Core. In that effort, he actually made a great case for Core opponents, illustrating the contradictions of the Core while furnishing several examples of all-too-frequent Core spin. And he did it, ironically, while implying that Core opponents have "badly and sometimes mischievously muddled" the Core story.
To lay all of this out I'll provide some quotes, then either respond to them with my own information, or with another, largely contradictory, quote from Bennett's piece. Let's begin:
First, we can all agree that there is a need for common standards of assessment in K-12 education.
We can? What's the evidence for that? Bennett offers none, and even loaded polling questions find that only about two-thirds of Americans support generic standards "that are the same across states." And I, for one, think there need to be competing standards in order to see what works, what works better, and what works for different subsets of the unique individuals we call "children."
When I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1980s, I asked 250 people across the political spectrum what 10 books every student should be familiar with by the time they finish high school. Almost every person agreed on five vital sources: the Bible, Shakespeare, America's founding documents, the great American novel "Huckleberry Finn" and classical works of mythology and poetry, like the Iliad and the Odyssey….That's the fundamental idea behind a core curriculum: preserving and emphasizing what's essential, in fields like literature and math, to a worthwhile education.
Presumably, the Core includes these readings that almost everyone Bennett polled agreed students should tackle. Right? Um, no:
Why then is Common Core drawing such heavy fire? Some of the criticism is legitimate, but much of it is based on myths. For example, a myth persists that Common Core involves a required reading list. Not so.
Here we see a basic problem for Core supporters: they want the public to believe either that the Core is rich and rigorous, or that it is empty and just a floor, depending, is seems, on whom they are trying to convince to support it. So in one breath they'll talk about the obvious need for core content, and in the next they'll protest if anyone says the standards have, well, core content. This may be because there actually is no unanimous agreement on what students should read.
Governors, state education administrators and teachers used these principles as a guide when they developed a set of common standards that were later presented to the country as Common Core. Forty-five states signed up originally.
Let's be clear: States adopted the Core, in the vast majority of cases, only after the federal government all but said they had to in order to compete for $4 billion in Race to the Top money. Federal force was further applied by the No Child Left Behind waiver program. And all this occurred in the context of federally driven standards and testing since at least 1994. So, would most states have adopted the Core on their own? We don't know for sure, but the evidence is heavily stacked against it.
Critics accused President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan of dangling federal money to encourage states to adopt the Common Core. The administration never should have done this. It made a voluntary agreement among states look like a top-down directive from the federal government. But remember: The original Common Core standards were separate from the federal government, and they can be separated once again.
Huh? Critics didn't just "accuse" – the Obama administration actually did dangle money, as Bennett himself acknowledges. Meanwhile, what Bennett ignores, but even Core supporters like Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute agree on, is that Core supporters worked to get the federal government to incentivize adoption of the Core. So the Core is in no meaningful way "separate from the federal government."
Call it Common Core or call it something else, as Arizona has done by renaming its standards "Arizona's College and Career Ready Standards," but public schools should have high standards based on a core curriculum that is aligned with tests that are comparable across state lines.
Talk about misinformation! Bennett seems to be advising states to deceive the public by simply renaming the Core. Then he offers this:
The U.S. has several types of national exams that assume at least some common basis of knowledge and understanding. These exams—NAEP, AP, SAT and ACT—work and most of the country agrees that they are useful.
It's not clear on what Bennett bases the assertion that "most of the country agrees that they are useful," but what's interesting is that we already have national standards! So why force everyone to use the Common Core?
Next, there's this:
The standards do not prescribe what is taught in our classrooms or how it's taught.
You just have to read the standards to know that this is wrong. Or even just understand the logic of standards: What would be the point if they didn't prescribe at all what is taught? And in some cases, the Core absolutely does delve into "how" things are taught, which Core supporters would likely agree enters the realm of curriculum. And that's exactly what Bennett seems to want, having said above that "public schools should have high standards based on a core curriculum that is aligned with tests that are comparable across state lines."
The principles behind the Common Core affirm a great intellectual tradition and inheritance. We should not allow them to be hijacked by the federal government or misguided bureaucrats and politicos.
The problem is that the Core has already been taken over by the feds, bureaucrats, and politicos, which is a huge reason that many conservatives – not to mention liberals, libertarians, and others – are opposed to them. Another likely reason? The feeling that they just can't get straight answers from Common Core defenders.
Five Absurd Overreactions to the Surge in Child Migrants
Alex Nowrasteh
The surge of unaccompanied migrant children (UAC) that dominated the news cycle in June and July of this year has receded – so much so that many emergency shelters established to handle the inflow are shutting down. At the height of the surge, many commentators and government officials expected 90,000 UAC to be apprehended by the end of the fiscal year (FY). As the end of the FY approaches, the number of apprehended UAC stands at roughly 66,000 - far below the estimates.
Now that the surge has receded, here are some of the most absurd overreactions to it. Never before have so many commentators been so angry over so few migrants.
1. U.S. Representative Phil Gingrey (R-GA) quoted in "POLITIFACT: Deadly viruses part of border crisis?" Tampa Bay Times (July 29).
Rep. Gingrey said: "Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning." [Emphasis added]
Ebola is a terrifying virus and a recent outbreak in West Africa shared the headlines with the surge in UAC, but that doesn't mean the two events are linked. Rep. Gingrey's office indicated that he heard about child migrants carrying Ebola from border agents. The rest of us are still waiting to hear about it.
2. Mackubin Thomas Owens, "Camp of the Saints, 2014 Style?" National Review Online (June 13).
Apparently the terrible consequences of an influx of child migrants, which was only equal to about 6 percent of the total number of legal immigrants admitted this year, was predicted by a controversial 1973 French novel entitled The Camp of the Saints – which described the end of Western Civilization due to an influx of third-world immigrants.
Owens' comments reveal a Western tradition that should be abandoned – that every small issue signals the downfall of Western Civilization.
3. Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, "SOUTHCOM chief: Central America drug war a fire threat to U.S. national security," Military Times (July 8).
"In comparison to other global threats, the near collapse of societies in the hemisphere with the associated drug and illegal alien flow are frequently viewed to be of low importance. Many argue these threats are not existential and do not challenge our national security. I disagree." [Emphasis added]
There are certainly national security challenges that accompany America's disastrous prosecution of the war on drugs and there is a security component to regulating immigration. But it is quite a leap to go from pointing out problems that could potentially get worse to then stating they are "existential."
4. Allen West, "Aliens coming to your neighborhood? White House secretly dispersing illegal immigrants around the country," allenbwest.com (July 14).
Former Representative Allen West (R-FL) claims that hundreds of UAC are being resettled in places like Nebraska as part of a left-wing plot to change demographics in those places:
"Nebraska is another red state — could it be the liberal progressive objective is to begin altering the demographics there as well?"
West then lists lots of other places where UAC were being settled – in red and blue states alike.
5. Dinesh D'Souza, "Manipulation by Obama Caused U.S. border Crisis – Dinesh D'Souza," Interview with USAWatchdog.com, (August 6).
Dinesh D'Souza cites Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals as the inspiration for a cynical Obama Administration ploy to cause the border crisis to convince Americans to embrace his agenda. D'Souza said:
I think the border crisis is a pure Alinsky type of move. Here's what I mean by that. Alinsky's strategy was always to take people of good will and put them into an impossible situation. At one point in his book, he talks about exploiting the innocence and decency of the American middle class. We don't like to say no to people who show up with outstretched arms. They're hungry, they're sick, they need inoculations. So, Obama's point is how do I manipulate the goodness of the American people to put them in an impossible position? Well, simply put out the word on the other side of the border that we are not that serious about enforcing the immigration laws. Moreover, we are trying to get amnesty for lawbreakers already in this country. Pretty soon, half the world shows up, and Obama throws up his hands and pretends, oh gee, how did they all come here? I don't blame them. I blame the cynicism and manipulation of the Obama Administration which has manufactured, to a large degree, this crisis.[Emphasis added]
So, President Obama uses the cynical logic of Alinsky's Rules for Radical to cause the surge in UAC to support his political agenda … but didn't foresee the disastrously negative political consequences such a surge would have for him, his party, and the prospects for immigration reform? D'Souza's claim doesn't pass the laugh test.
Overreactions of this caliber are the norm for other policy debates too. Holding people to this standard is a small way to address this chronic annoyance.
Why Is Barack Obama Lecturing Scotland about Its Independence Vote?
Doug Bandow
Polls show a close vote over Scottish independence. It is a momentous decision, but why is President Barack Obama bothering the Scots with his opinion?
Until recently virtually everyone outside of Scotland believed that the Scots would deliver a solid no vote. But many in the UK's north feel disenfranchised. More fundamentally, many Scots reject the more vibrant market system which characterizes the UK as well as U.S.
The tightening race has created panic in Westminster. Now the three largest national parties are promising to pass along additional powers to the Scottish assembly—though they can't agree on how much and which powers.
Britain's government long has been overly centralized, but the rush to toss national authority overboard raises the question: what is Westminster hoping to preserve? If the Scots are so unhappy with the present system, why not accept the result with grace?
Even a narrow win in which almost half of voters say they wanted to leave might prove Pyrrhic. It would leave a barely united United Kingdom, one likely to face continuing Scottish dissatisfaction and future secession votes.
Yet a comical cavalcade of outsiders has been telling the Scottish what to do.
For instance, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said "it's hard to see how the world would be helped by an independent Scotland." Russian President Vladimir Putin observed: "one should not forget that being part of a single strong state has some advantages." Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang endorsed a "strong, prosperous and united United Kingdom."
In June President Barack Obama declared: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," meaning the UK, which he said appeared to have "worked pretty well." He worried about the impact on the U.S.: "the United Kingdom has been an extraordinary partner for us." Moreover, "we obviously have a deep interest in making sure that one of the closest allies that we will ever have remains strong, robust, united and an effective partner."
President Obama didn't stop there. He also told the United Kingdom that it should remain in the European Union. Opined the president: "With respect to the EU, we share a strategic vision with Great Britain on a whole range of international issues and so it's always encouraging for us to know that Great Britain has a seat at the table in the larger European project."
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) argued: "It's clear from this side of the Atlantic that a United Kingdom, including Scotland, would be the strongest possible American ally." He was joined by 26 colleagues in introducing a resolution declaring "that a united, secure, and prosperous United Kingdom is important for U.S. national security priorities in Europe and around the world."
While Westminster, which apparently requested the president to intervene, might find these arguments convincing, not so the Scottish public. Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, who is running the yes campaign, observed that "Being told what to do tends to instigate a position in Scotland where we will say we will choose our own way forward."
The American experience inspires some. One Scottish independence activist told NBC News: "Americans went through their own struggle for independence 200 years ago and it turned out pretty well for them. They were the pioneers of this process! You would expect America to look out for what's in its own best interests and there's no reason why Scotland shouldn't be exactly the same."
Indeed. As I wrote in my new American Spectator article: "Whatever the Scots choose on September 18, Americans should wish them well."
What the President Said about ISIS, and What I Heard
Christopher A. Preble
It seems particularly appropriate, on this 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, to ponder anew what counterterrorism steps are prudent and effective, and what measures are reckless and counterproductive.
With this in mind, I was moderately inclined to go along with President Obama's plan to attack the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), provided that he defined a limited and achievable set of goals, and therefore established limits on the size and scope of the U.S. military mission.
But when the president says this:
"We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are."
I hear this:
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note…"
Though they didn't race there, a team of U.S. special forces eventually made their way to Pakistan and pumped a couple of bullets into bin Laden, so he's not making these videos any more. That seems worthy. If we can repeat these sorts of operations elsewhere, and shut up a few more loudmouths, we should.
But the larger point stands. We shouldn't terrorize ourselves. We shouldn't exaggerate the threat posed by terrorism. And we shouldn't react in ways that feed the terrorists' narrative, or serve the terrorists' goals.
The Naked Truth about TSA Spending
Chris Edwards
Governments tend to spend money on low-value activities because they do not have market signals or customer feedback to guide them. In this report, I examined the problem with respect to the Transportation Security Administration. As one example, TSA's SPOT program for finding terrorists spends more than $200 million a year with few if any benefits.
Further confirmation of TSA's misallocation problem comes from a new academic study looking at the full-body "nudie" scanners installed in U.S. airports at great expense between 2009 and 2013. A team of university researchers bought a Rapiscan Secure 1000 backscatter X-ray machine and began testing it on various types of weapons and explosives. It turns out that a terrorist could fool the machines pretty easily:
We find that the system provides weak protection against adaptive adversaries: It is possible to conceal knives, guns, and explosives from detection by exploiting properties of the device's backscatter X-ray technology.
If you walked though the machines with a big block of C-4 plastic explosive in your hands, it would be detected. The problem, of course, is that terrorists are smarter than that:
We show that an adaptive adversary, with the ability to refine his techniques based on experiment, can confidently smuggle contraband past the scanner by carefully arranging it on his body, obscuring it with other materials, or properly shaping it. Using these techniques, we are able to hide firearms, knives, plastic explosive simulants, and detonators in our tests. These attacks are surprisingly robust, and they suggest a failure on the part of the Secure 1000's designers and the TSA to adequately anticipate adaptive attackers.
The Rapiscan machines were pulled from U.S. airports due to concerns about civil liberties and the possible health effects of emitted radiation. But as one of the study authors observed to Bloomberg: "What does this say about how these scanners were tested and acquired in the first place? … It says there's something wrong with the government's process … [the process] is secret and not independent. Those are problems." It's also a problem that the government has a monopoly on aviation security, and that TSA is not accountable to anyone for its level of efficiency or performance. Well, it's accountable to Congress I suppose, but that doesn't really amount to much these days.
The good news is that airport security screening does not have to be a government monopoly. We should move to private contracting with federal oversight, which is the approach taken by Canada and numerous European countries. For more, see my report and check out the writings of Bob Poole at Reason.
IRS Testifies to Congress: "Wherever We Can, We Follow The Law"
Michael F. CannonIRS: "Wherever we can, we follow the law"
Cato Live Tweeting Obama's ISIS Speech! #CatoWHSpeech
Christopher A. Preble
At 9:00PM tonight, President Obama will announce expanded U.S. military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He will likely explain an apparent change in direction that will include airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and possibly increased training and weapons procurement for the Iraqi military and "moderate" segments of the Syrian rebellion. Americans are understandably worried about getting sucked back into an open-ended conflict.
Don't miss Cato experts live tweeting Obama's speech tonight, using the hashtag #CatoWHSpeech. You can check out the reactions and opinions of our scholars in real time. Just follow along and join in!
CO2 Going Up. Human Progress Going Up.
Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger
Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly "Current Wisdom."
Yesterday it was announced by the World Meteorological Organization (an arm of the United Nations), with front page coverage by the global media, that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) last year reached a new high value (396 parts per million, ppm) and got there in record time (2.9ppm/yr). Although newer data (through July of 2014) indicate that the rate of rise has fallen back again to levels more characteristic of the past decade, the signal remains—carbon dioxide is building in the atmosphere and rising to levels that have probably not been seen in along time (hundreds of thousands of years).
This rise is a continued reminder of the steady drumbeat of human progress. The carbon dioxide that is building in the atmosphere, at least in part, gets there through human emissions of carbon dioxide that are the by-product of burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) to produce the vast majority the energy that has powered mankind's industrial and technical ascent since the Industrial Revolution.
The gradual increase in the rate of the rise of the carbon dixoide concentration is a sign that we are continuing to expand our energy use and availability, primarily in developing countries like India and China. With more than a billion people still without much access to electricity (and many more than that who would like access to more) and all the life-improving benefits that come with it, we still have a long way to go.
Consequently, we should anticipate that the atmospheric CO2 concentration will continue to grow for many years to come.
The benefits that fossil use have delivered to humanity are enormous. A taste of them can be found at Cato's HumanProgress.org website and a compelling case for why we should continue to embrace and expand fossil fuel use is made by Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress in his excellent (and very soon forthcoming) book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
The only concern that arises from growing atmospheric CO2 levels stems from the potential climate changes that may result. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that acts basically to trap heat trying to escape from earth to space. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the projections of climate change that have been made by the current family of computerized climate models has been overdone—that the world will warm up significantly less than has been predicted as a result of our ongoing carbon dioxide emissions. We continue to detail the evidence that the earth's "climate sensitivity" to carbon dioxide is less than expected. Our most recent summary of the new, relevant literature on this topic is available here. Less warming means less resultant impacts which mean less worry about rising CO2 levels (and less impetus for governemtn action).
So rather than accompanying the WMO announcement with hand-wringing and talk of self-destructive doom and gloom—which was obiquitous in media coverage of the data release—the more appropriate response would be to applaud our progress in energy expansion across the world.
The last time an announcement of atmospheric CO2 levels reaching some new high (an announcement that could be made virtually every day), we wrote:
[The rise] of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should remind us of our continuing success at expanding the global supply of energy to meet a growing demand. That success which ultimately leads to an improvement of the global standard of living and a reduction in vulnerability to the vagaries of weather and climate.
[The rise] is cause for celebration.
The same holds today, and will do so far into the future.
U.S. Policy Choices Regarding China
Ted Galen Carpenter
While the Obama administration has preoccupied itself with developments in Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, a far more important foreign policy relationship continues to deteriorate. Late last month, a nasty incident occurred when a Chinese fighter plane intercepted and harassed a U.S. spy plane near Hainan Island, where China has a major submarine base. It is just the latest in a growing list of spats between Washington and Beijing.
Relations had already become tense because of China's expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea and its acrimonious dispute with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Washington suspects that China is trying to become the dominant power in East Asia and gradually displace the United States from that role. Beijing suspects that the United States is trying to enlist East Asian nations in a de facto containment policy directed against China, although Americans also want to continue enjoying the benefits of an extensive economic relationship with that country. Both sides are probably correct in their suspicions.
In an article over at the National Interest Online, I suggest that the Obama administration's China policy is a dangerous muddle. Instead of continuing to drift toward an implicit, hostile containment policy, even as America's regional clout continues to erode, the United States should consider two other options. One would be to recognize China as the pre-eminent power in East Asia, thereby accepting a Chinese equivalent of America's long-standing Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. I discuss that option in greater detail in an article in China-U.S. Focus. Britain's willingness in the 1890s to defer to the United States in the Western Hemisphere ended tensions between the two countries and ushered in an era of extremely close relations. A similar trend might occur following such a U.S. concession to China in East Asia.
But as I note, Britain and the United States were both democratic, capitalist states with similar cultures and overlapping interests. Today's China, on the other hand, is an authoritarian, quasi-capitalist country. Conceding regional pre-eminence to a country with those characteristics would be much harder and riskier for the United States.
The other policy option would be for the United States to adopt a much lower security profile in that part of the world and allow a natural balance of power to develop between China and its uneasy neighbors, led by Japan. That approach would recognize that the strategic and economic dominance that the United States enjoyed following the end of World War II was artificial and has been fading for at least a quarter century. Not only China's rise, but the growing prosperity and capabilities of other East Asian nations have eroded Washington's advantages. U.S. power in the region is still superior to that of any other actor, but the margin grows narrower, and that trend is likely to continue. Policymakers need to ask themselves whether it is realistic to expect that a country whose homeland is thousands of miles away can continue to be East Asia's hegemon much longer. It makes more sense to relinquish that role gradually and create incentives for Japan, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, South Korea and other countries to become more assertive in balancing China's growing power and sometimes abrasive behavior.
Fostering the development of an independent regional balance of power has some drawbacks. It would require the United States to relinquish the security role it has played for nearly seven decades, as well as relinquish the prestige and influence accompanying that role. And there is no guarantee that adopting a lower U.S. security profile in East Asia would produce the outcome we desire. Although unlikely, it is possible that the countries there would capitulate and accept Chinese dominance instead of assuming the costs and risks required to balance that country. Alternatively, the emergence of multiple well-armed powers could create greater instability in the region. No strategy is risk free.
One point is increasingly apparent, however. Clear policy choices, even if difficult, need to be made. As China's power grows, it will become harder and riskier for Washington to continue its contradictory strategy of containing China while trying to enjoy the fruits of a close bilateral economic relationship. We need a more coherent China policy—and soon.
Degrade ISIS's Capabilities, Avoid Mission Creep
Christopher A. Preble
In a primetime address Wednesday evening, President Obama will announce that he will authorize U.S. airstrikes in Syria as part of his larger strategy to degrade and destroy ISIS. This represents a marked escalation of U.S. action against the notorious group that now controls large swathes of northern Iraq and Syria. According to the New York Times, the president's strategy will be "a long-term campaign far more complex than the targeted strikes the United States has used against Al Qaeda in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere."
In advance of his speech, I have written a piece for Reason in which I urge the president to listen to the American people.
A majority of Americans support a military response – though not U.S. troops on the ground. Very few are content with allowing ISIS to spread its influence with impunity, especially after the brutal killing of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The group has effectively declared itself an enemy of the United States, and there is growing support for action against the group before it even attempts an attack on the U.S. homeland (something that it appears only to be aspiring to, as opposed to actively planning for).
In the article, I also warn against mission creep, the possibility of which is all too real.
The hawks on both the left and right believe that a large U.S. ground presence is required because they don't want to limit the mission to merely hitting ISIS – they want to restore stability and order in Iraq, exclude Iranian influence from Iraqi politics, and topple Bashar Assad in Syria. In other words, they want us back in the nation-building business, but now in two countries racked by civil war and sectarian hatreds, instead of just one.
To avoid being drawn into such a scenario, the president needs to clearly answer two particularly relevant questions: how large a response is justified; and what end state is acceptable? The president should resist sending in a large number of ground troops and be content to degrade ISIS to the point that it can be contained by the many enemies that directly surround it.
Read the whole thing here.
Self-Driving School Choice
Jason Bedrick
Over at Education Next today, I discuss how self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically expand educational options. Here's a taste:
Self-driving cars will be able to respond to surroundings much faster than human reflexes, allowing for greater safety at much greater speeds. That will cut down on commute times, or allow people to work—or send their kids to school—further from home with the same commute time. Moreover, freed from the need to focus on the road, time spent commuting could be much more productive.
With commutes shorter and more productive, the distance that parents will consider logistically feasible will significantly increase. That could exponentially expand the number of educational options that parents consider within driving distance. Using Private School Review's search feature, I found 12 private schools within three miles of my Arizona home, 34 schools within five miles, 69 schools within ten miles, 234 schools within 25 miles, and 304 schools within 50 miles. Now that's choice!
Arkansas' Budget-Busting Medicaid Expansion
Nicole Kaeding
Back in February, I highlighted the fight to reauthorize Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare in Arkansas. The states' plan not only expanded Medicaid; it did so in a more expensive way. Supporters claimed that the concerns were hogwash. Costs would be the same or lower because Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) required "budget neutrality" for the expansion. A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirms that AR's expansion is a budget-buster.
Medicaid provides insurance to low-income individuals, focused on pregnant women, children, and the disabled. ObamaCare sought to expand this program adding millions of able-bodied, childless adults to the program. States that agreed to dramatically expand the entitlement program would receive a large sum of federal funding. The federal government agreed to fund 100 percent of expenditures through 2016, slowly decreasing to 90 percent in 2020 and after. Even with the large financial enticement, states, rightly, resisted. The program is expensive to operate. States also have little control over the program. The quality of insurance is poor. A 2013 study found "no significant improvements" in health outcomes for individuals joining the program.
Arkansas decided to try something different. Under the plan passed by Democrat Governor Mike Beebe and the Republican legislature, more than 200,000 individuals would join the state's Medicaid rolls. These individuals would not join the traditional program, but instead would receive money from the state and federal government to purchase insurance on the state's newly-created health insurance exchange. This plan was preferable, according to advocates, because it would eliminate the known health disparities between traditional Medicaid and private insurance. Better yet, the AR Department of Human Services said that the so-called private option would save the state $670 million over the next ten years and would save the federal government $600 million. Choice and competition would power the market and result in lower prices.
Supporters argued that if the state was going to dramatically expand an entitlement program; it should do it in a fiscally-conservative way saving money in the process.
However, subsidizing Medicaid expansion through private insurance is not fiscally conservative. It turns out that private insurance costs $3,000–or 50 percent more–per enrollee than traditional Medicaid coverage according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Spending $3,000 per person more adds up to a huge added cost for taxpayers. This would be compounded by the Arkansas' decision–due to federal strings–to eliminate any out-of-pocket expenses for enrollees; no co-pays, no deductibles, no cost-sharing.
Supporters of Arkansas' expansion claimed it didn't matter because HHS's approval required that the plan be "budget neutral." In other words, the federal government would not spend more than if the state pursued traditional expansion. If the state exceeded the budget cap, the state would be responsible for the additional expenses. The state would be forced to tweak the program later if costs rose.
The plan passed and costs quickly grew. The first month was overbudget. As of June, the program was $10 million overbudget.
GAO now says that HHS did not guarantee budget neutrality in the Arkansas plan suggesting that even more taxpayer money is at risk. "HHS did not ensure budget neutrality. HHS approved a spending limit that included hypothetical costs despite questionable state assumptions and limited supporting documentation…HHS officially told us they accepted the state's projections of the increased cost of expanding Medicaid in the absence of a demonstration without requesting data to support the state's assumptions."
HHS just accepted what Arkansas said, and did not question the state's assumptions. The promised federal backstop does not seem to exist. GAO estimates that the "$4.0 billion spending limit approved by HHS was about $778 million [over three years] more than what it would have been." That's a 20 percent increase in costs for federal taxpayers.
Making matters worse, GAO says that AR has the authority to "adjust the approved spending limits if costs…prove higher than expected." This sort of upward flexibility never used to be granted, but HHS recently granted it to 11 other states. AR has already acknowledged that it might need a higher spending limit.
This is not the first time that GAO has highlighted HHS' inability to properly enforce budget neutrality. HHS' refusal to properly set spending caps is costing federal taxpayers millions, or billions, more than it should. GAO confirms that Medicaid expansion in Arkansas is busting the budget.
Clinton and Bush Introduce Leadership Program
Tim Lynch
Yesterday Bill Clinton and George W. Bush reportedly gushed "about each other's leadership and acute decision-making skills." The two former presidents were launching a "joint program to train young leaders."
According to the New York Times story, the audience was "packed with Bush and Clinton White House alumni." Oh, that explains all the laughter and backslapping. The former presidents were confident that no one would ask them serious questions about their actions in office. Here are a few questions that young leaders might consider asking the gentlemen before applying for their program:
- Why did you leave us with trillions of debt?
- Why the unending war in Iraq?
- Why did you both disregard the Constitution?


text:
I'm in rehearsals for a production of Pride and Prejudice "down to the BY," as my wife's grandfather would have said. (Occasionally I've wondered why folks don't call that university "The 'B.'" It's probably because of the "Y" on the mountain. "Why just a 'Y'?" you ask, in unison and, because of the supra-global sweep of Meridian's readership, in various colorful dialects.
Well, the story is that when somebody had the idea of emblazoning "BYU" on the mountainside, they prudently started with the Y, so the whole thing would be centered. But the Y was so hard to make that they abandoned the founder's first initial (("B")) and the letter that might have let the public in on what all that stone and whitewash stands for ((a "U")). This story may not be true, but it has the authentic aura that surrounds folk tales—thank goodness, because folk tales are, in most ways that really matter, more true than actual history. Certainly more worthy of believing in.)
I'm Mr Bennet (the British don't punctuate "Mr"). I'm one of three grown-ups in the cast, the other two being Mrs Bennet (the British don't punctuate "Mrs") and the Lady Catherine de Bourgh (nobody would dare punctuate Lady Catherine de Bourgh). Typically the only two other grown-ups in the room are the director, Barta Heiner, and one of the two dramaturgs, Anne Flinders. (The playwright, Melissa Leilani Larson, may be considered by some to be just over the line into grown-upness. ((You must remember that all these designations are being assigned by a guy who considers Barack Obama too young to hold a driver's license.)) ) For rehearsals involving only the Bennet family, I've typically been the only guy in the room—totally female family, female director, female production staff, and two female dramaturgs. As will be the audience, too, except for those few guys who are savvy enough to know that accompanying their dates to any Jane Austen show will score major, major points.
(A word about dramaturgs: Good luck defining what the heck one is, besides brainy and nice and one of them has a dog that acts ((in this very show!)). I think the definition of "dramaturg" is something you feel rather than try to articulate. And it takes a certain kind of person to feel it—Bill Gates, for example, will not even admit that "dramaturg" is a word.)
On the subject of dogs that act: I never learned to act. I mean, like in a classroom or from a teacher. Everybody else in this show did. Some still are, technically, being students and all, but mostly everybody has already learned. They're terrific. Even the two grown-ups who aren't me. Laura Wardle, who is Mrs Bennet, was the only woman in memory (her memory) who ever received a Master's degree in Acting from BYU. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is in real life Hilary Straga, who's a casting director for LDS Church films. It's delightful to be considered on a sort of equal footing with Ms (the British don't punctuate "Ms") Straga in this project, because out in church filmland all our encounters are between the powerful Keeper of the Keys and the hungry actor. But she has always brought tremendous grace to being so powerful, and some of my best acting has been for just her, even when I didn't get the part I was after.
(Anecdote that I may have shared before: For the big Joseph Smith movie, they were looking to cast the guards at Richmond Jail, whom the prophet called "Fiends Of The Infernal Pit." When I was called in to audition I found deeps of evil in me that I brought to the surface with a fury that visibly frightened Hilary, and would have frightened even the intrepid Catherine de Bourgh. I was excited when I learned that I'd been cast as a fiend OTIP, and looked forward to a useful stretch as an actor, sort of like I got once upon a time being Sweeney Todd. But when I showed up, they yanked me out of the awful card-playing squad that bragged and blasphemed at the cell door and put me inside with the brethren, silently checking their chains and trying not to disturb them too much. Then when the prophet stood to rebuke The Fiends, the camera pushed in for a close-up on me actually being spiritually affected by his words. They made me "The Sympathetic Fiend"! My audition was wasted! Oh well, I got to tote a truly wicked rifle.)
Dogs that can act. Last Thursday evening, our director gave us an assignment: Carefully research and choose an animal that your character might be if your character were an animal. Don't tell anybody what it is, but come early on Saturday morning prepared for an "acting exercise." Everybody else probably had a pretty good idea of what to expect. Not me.
Here's how it went down. We all lay on tumbling mats on the floor with the lights dimmed. The company, who seemed to know innately exactly what to do, had arrayed big black blocks of varying proportions in almost random patterns, some forming little walls, some tunnels, some leaning on others in diagonal ways. In the silence, with our eyes closed, we followed Barta's instructions to breathe in energy and breathe out tension. We were allowed to endow these gasses with colors, if we thought it might help. This was not general, lung-centric breathing, but was dispensed to every part of our persons from toenails to the hair follicles upon our heads, where, on me at least, the gasses, both incoming and outgoing, got lost.
Once we had reached a meditative state that would have made the Beatles jealous, we were invited to contemplate our chosen animals. On the day before, I wasn't able to think of as many as five animals to choose from, let alone an animal who embodied the essential characteristics of an English country gentleman living in a high estrogen zone. So I asked Mr Google "What kind of animal would my character be?" Instantly I had at my fingertips a few dozen quizzes I could take that would determine the answer scientifically, unanimously, incontrovertibly. So I just started answering the questions the way I knew Mr Bennet would. The first quiz concluded that Mr Bennet was a wolf. I took another. It affirmed that Mr Bennet was an unspecified bird. The third quiz made him a dolphin, the fourth a bear, and the fifth quiz (the first one wherein the questions were composed with conventional grammar) identified Bennet as a mole.
Actually, mole attracted me, because the site said that both Bob Dylan and John Lennon were moles. But I wasn't confident I could pull it off, so I took a sixth quiz. It said "Cat" and something inside me went "ping" in an affirmative manner. Cats are something this actor can take or leave, but here are the parallels: Bennet is mostly about emotional hiding out. See the cat when something chaotic is happening, tiptoeing off to somewhere the heck else.
Changing fields: Returned missionary college football players find new opportunities to share gospel


text:
Christmas pt. 1: Puritans, Anglicans, and Christmas as a holiday of extremes
It's not a secret that because of the measures taken by the later Roman Empire to convert mainland European pagan society to Christianity, many Christian festivals retain elements evocative of Pagan worship practices. Some of the most important of the Pagan religious festivals took place (and continue to take place) in late December, when ceremonies such as Saturnalia and Winter Solstice were observed.
Another facet of these late December celebrations was the element of feasting. For the majority of human history, the year was organized on the basis of agriculture and food availability, and late December was the time at which livestock was ready for slaughter, and alcohol was fully fermented. As Europe became Christianized, the late December practice of over-indulging on alcohol and freshly slaughtered meat simply became a part of the Christmas festivities, rather than of the Saturnalia or Solstice festivities.
With Christianization came the enforced rigidity of the class structure on the basis of the idea that a person's place in life was divinely mandated. In Britain, a paternalistic attitude towards the poor developed within the upper classes as a result of this divinely-mandated class structure.
As you may imagine, this immobility created anger and resentment in the lower classes. So every Christmas, the lower classes were allowed to participate in a sort of sanctioned role reversal. They took up the dress of the upper classes, and were allowed, for that day only, to act with the authority allowed by that garb. They were allowed to enter the homes of the rich and demand from them food, drink, and money. These practices are known in turn as "misrule" and "wassailing."
This annual pageantry and begging functioned as a sort of social safety valve for Britain; it allowed the poor a socially sanctioned period at which to vent their frustrations while upholding the class structure. However, as Puritanism took hold in Britain, a growing sect of the population rejected Christmas—viewing it as a thinly veiled Pagan festival, and holding that if Jesus had intended for his birthday to be celebrated on December 25, it would have been noted in the Bible—and with it, its social safety valve function.
In 1620 many of the Puritans emigrated from England to the New World so that they would be able to worship as they wished. Christmas was neither observed nor recognized in the Massachusetts colony, and it was even banned between 1659 and 1681; these policies were strengthened by the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell over England between 1649 and 1658. Though the monarchy was restored in 1660, in took the British government until 1681 to re-establish control over New England—which is why the ban on Christmas was revoked in that year—and until 1686 to send over an official to directly intervene in the governance of the colony.
In 1686, the highly unpopular British official Sir Edmund Andros was sent over to govern the short-lived Dominion of New England in America. He pushed Anglican forms of worship on the Puritan population, celebrating Christmas and saints' days in the traditional manner. In 1689, the Puritans revolted against him and his officers, ousting him from New England. Though they returned to their traditional manner of ignoring Christmas, they were not allowed to criminalize it; however, the damage had been done.
Despite Puritan attitudes towards Christmas, the notion that December 25 was a day of celebration, misrule, and role reversal was never completely absent from the culture of New England, especially among the lower and transient classes. And as a result of the direct British involvement in the New England colonies as outlined above, by the end of the 17th century, segments of the New England population began to openly observe it in the old Anglican way.
The problem was that these segments tended to be the lower classes, and because Puritans refused to acknowledge the holiday, it would never be able to function as a social safety valve. Instead, the opposite happened. Because the lower classes took up traditional forms of Christmas celebration, they would drink, feast, and then travel in bands, demanding entrance into the homes of the wealthy. And when the wealthy Puritan homeowners, in their non-observance of Christmas, would deny them entrance, they responded with verbal harassment, vandalism, breaking and entering, and theft.
Instead of a holiday of the venting of class-related frustrations, Christmas in New England bad become a holiday of thinly veiled class warfare. As this continued year after year, the Protestant establishment began to feel more conciliatory towards the holiday; probably because they were sick of the annual disruptions. Though they continued to reject it as a celebration of the birth of Christ, they accepted observation of the holiday so long as it was done quietly and in a church.
Thus, Christmas existed in New England for the majority of the eighteenth century as either a time of quiet worship or a time of thinly-veiled class warfare, with no middle ground. To understand how Christmas was transformed from that to the holiday which looms in the American consciousness from Halloween to January 1, it is necessary to move a little bit south, to the island of Manhattan. This transformation will be discussed in Christmas pt. 2: How a Bunch of Rich Guys from Manhattan Invented Modern Christmas.


text:
Use an office Mac from a home Mac | 8 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Use an office Mac from a home Mac
And that is actually what the hint author is telling us how to do through an ssh-tunnel. This is very practical, if we for example only have ssh access through the firewall and or router.
From our Sponsor...
Latest Mountain Lion Hints
User Functions
What's New:
HintsNo new hints
Comments last 2 daysNo new comments
Links last 2 weeks
What's New in the Forums?
Hints by Topic
News from Macworld
From Our Sponsors
Copyright © 2014 IDG Consumer & SMB (Privacy Policy) Contact Us
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Visit other IDG sites:
Created this page in 0.09 seconds


text:
Kevin Narizny, an assistant professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., has an interesting essay in the latest issue of the journal World Politics. The paper is called "Anglo-American Primacy and the Global Spread of Democracy: An International Genealogy" and, in it, Narizny argues "that Anglo-American primacy over the past three centuries was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of the global spread of democracy." Read more…
Akin's Instagram Feed
About me
David Akin is Sun Media's national bureau chief and is based in Sun Media's Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Click through for Akin's contact information and full biography
Subscribe to David's Akin On The Hill
Recent Posts
- "Nobody's gonna intimidate us" : The NDP experience this morning
- Parliament's budget watchdog warns: We're not as rich as we think!
- Left-leaning think tank says right-leaning ones getting a pass on taxman scrutiny
- Just so we're clear: Here's my disclosure on income splitting
- Trudeau would undo any Harper income-splitting scheme
Recent Comments
- Dennis Galon on Copyright and attack ads: Progressive mayor uses Sona image to attack conservative challenger
- Gabby in QC on Just so we're clear: Here's my disclosure on income splitting
- stephen s on Copyright and attack ads: Progressive mayor uses Sona image to attack conservative challenger
- stephen s on Copyright and attack ads: Progressive mayor uses Sona image to attack conservative challenger
- stephen s on Copyright and attack ads: Progressive mayor uses Sona image to attack conservative challenger
Search in blog
Contribute to the blog
Other blogs...
- CanoeTech Blog
- Slam! sports blog
- The Projectionist
- Rabbit Ears
- The Turn Table
- Eye on the Hill
- Button Mashers
- Meandering Musings
- David Akin's On the Hill
- The Motts Sound Off
- Lilley's Pad
- In the rinks of the NOJHL
- Royal Spectacle
- Kryk Slants
- Monique's Morning Minute
- Deep Dish
- Heroes & Icons
- The Podium
Disclosure and fine print from David Akin
The posts on this blog are, by and large, created and maintained by me, David Akin, the national bureau chief for Sun Media and host of Battleground on Sun News Network.
I receive no fees, considerations, etc. for the posts on this blog nor do I have any plans to accept any beyond the salary paid to me by Sun Media and Sun News Network. Both those companies are owned by Quebecor Inc. As a publicly traded Canadian company, Quebecor must disclose financial and other information. You can monitor those disclosures at Quebecor's Web site.
You may see advertisements at this blog. I have no control over the placement or selection of that advertising. Both Sun Media and Sun News Network earn the money to pay my salary and the costs of hosting this blog by selling advertising.
I am not, nor have I ever been during my 30 years as a professional journalist, a member of any political party. No member of my immediate family is a member of or campaigns on behalf of any political party. Neither I nor anyone in my immediate family own shares or equity in any corporation or business, my employer's included. Any investments I have are in widely-held mutual funds.
If you think other disclosures are appropriate in this space, I'd like to hear from you. All of my contact details are always at www.davidakin.com.
- A few great lines … (74)
- Aboriginal Affairs (21)
- Agriculture (4)
- Arab Spring (4)
- Arts and Culture (17)
- Atlantic Canada Politics (11)
- BC Politics (33)
- China (6)
- Culture (10)
- Defence (7)
- Economy (70)
- Education (3)
- Energy (52)
- Environment (60)
- Foreign Affairs (77)
- Health (9)
- History (7)
- Immigration (4)
- Industry (2)
- Journalism (41)
- Justice (15)
- Main Page (2317)
- Municipal Politics (8)
- Ontario Politics (19)
- Politics (1031)
- Politics/Conservatives (273)
- Politics/Liberals (187)
- Politics/NDP (117)
- Politics/Polls (14)
- Public Safety and Security (2)
- Sun News Network (26)
- Technology (92)
- US Politics (28)


text:
I've been having speed problems with my Elite 6Mbps service. Since my "repair" I'm getting at or under 4.5/0.3 where a few months ago I was getting 5.7/0.6 up/down.I looked at my plan and now see that Elite 6Mbps is not available to me although I still have it !!!Does this explain my downgrade in speed?My service was spotty prior to the "repair" now it's just downright slow. I'm awaiting AT&T Direct response but I'm getting tired of messing with this, thinking I should move on.
It is possible that when they "repaired" the line it was discovered that the line cannot indeed reliably support a 6 Mbps service. If that is the case then the services offered to that address would have been adjusted accordingly. As such, if you call AT&T, they may force you to a lower tier to resolve this issue if the field notes indicate that the line cannot reliably provide service at the 6 Mbps level regardless of repairs due to infrastructure limitations.
Charter is in your area and internet only is exponentially faster 30Mb/4 for $30/mo for one year. You cannot touch that with anything DSL period.
I understand what you are saying and it makes perfect sense.I did try the 12Mbps service for a bit but my highest sync was marginal so that's why I'm at 6Mbps right now.I have records of running 5.7/0.6 from Speedtest all last year (except for a few times) up to the date of the repair.I'm just wondering what they could have changed while doing the repair to degrade my line further. My upload speed is now half what it used to be.Thanks
Thanks for the info! I've been considering, it's just all my e-mail addy's would need to change but I may bite the bullet.
Thanks for the info! I've been considering, it's just all my e-mail addy's would need to change but I may bite the bullet.
Great idea, I have Yahoo, maybe I'll change to that one!Thanks
Wow, even better news!Sounds like my decision is a no-brainer at this point.I'll wait for an AT&T response till Friday and if I'm not happy...Thanks
To prevent this problem and future ones change your email addresses to one of the generic email providers, so if you change ISPs, you don't have to worry about changing email addresses. That's what most people do to make it easier to follow the cheaper rates!
It just gets better and better!Thanks
Unfortunately Charter does not cover me but Comcast does .
If it's Comcast, I'd seriously mull it over before switching. For me AT&T is the far lesser of the two evils.
If it's Comcast, I'd seriously mull it over before switching. For me AT&T is the far lesser of the two evils.
I would have believed you a few months back when it was working so well but lately it's been driving me nuts.Thanks though, I'm sure Comcast users have stories to tell too .
Well, decided I've had enough cyanide and I'm going to try strychnine .It's unfortunate because I've had AT&T for as far back as I can remember, at least 12 years, but if they can't supply what I need then it's time to move on.Hope it all goes well .Thanks for everyone's help.


text:
The Tibetan Buddhist master and onetime abbot of Thrangu Monastery, Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, died suddenly this morning in Melbourne, Australia, site of the Kagyu E-vam Buddhist Institute which he founded.
Felicity Lodro and Kal Kingi of the E-Vam Institute—of which Rinpoche was director—issued a statement about his death; you can read it here. Shambhala Publications, which publishes Rinpoche's work, issued this statement, along with an excerpt from his book Mind at Ease..
Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche's work has appeared in the Shambhala Sunmagazine numerous times; here's a selection.
- Suffering: The Journey Starts Here — Traleg Rinpoche, Glenn Wallis, and Phillip Moffitt explain why anxiety and dissatisfaction are the means by which we can truly begin the practice of inner transformation.
- Training the Mind to Transform Adversity into Awakening –Buddhism's mind-training slogans help us work with all the challenges of life, from the upheavals of our own emotions to the inevitable losses and disappointments of this imperfect world. Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche explains how obstacles can be brought to the spiritual path and become opportunities for awakening.
- Seek A Spiritual Ground — A teaching by Traleg Rinpoche, from our "Fear and Fearlessness: What the Buddhists Teach" program, presented in conjunction with the Omega Institute.
- Depression's Truth — We are normally charmed by the world, under the spell of samsaric entertainment. But it's when we're depressed, says the Venerable Traleg Rinpoche, that we can see through that.
- Taming the Mind, Transforming Ourselves — Traleg Rinpoche describes the techniques of Buddhist meditation. Taming and transforming our wild passions involves the meditation of paying attention to the body and paying attention to our thoughts.
- Aim High but Don't Be So Hard on Yourself — Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche's advice to Western practitioners.


text:
Event detail
View event on a map
Pangolin London holds a joint exhibition of sculpture and works on paper by two highly established and diverse female sculptors, Charlotte Mayer and Almuth Tebbenhoff. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, both artists create work that is highly adventurous, playful and grippingly beautiful.
User opinions
Be the the first leave an opinion
User reviews are currently closed until the new ArtRabbit site launches 3rd November.


text:
Aww.... I'll have hubby give an extra one from you
Originally Posted by Krispers
happy new year young lady! oh if you were here I'd kiss you at midnight lol
"Made with Love from Krispers"
"Laughter is never too far away from tears"
Originally Posted by Splinter
Aww.... I'll have hubby give an extra one from you
Tells him new year new man see ya later hehe
Commiserate with Mr Ripples!
Olic? Who's Olic
When redds here it really is a party
Happy New Year Parkes Peeps!
Click here to fill out the CASAA FDA Comments Survey!
ECF Sub-Ohm Safety Tips
FDA Forum | CASAA Forum | Legislation News | Nicotine Myths | E-Cigarette Politics
New from ECF: www.VAPING.com
Happy new year hot stuff
{{{{hugs}}}}Happy New Year Bill, Mary Krispers and sweet friends* Thinking of you all~ Enjoy and be well~ be safe~ XOXOXXOO
We only have this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake ~Marie Ray
Happy new year peeps!
View Tag Cloud


text:
Athena Cosmetics Hair Conditioners
Hair Conditioners
The right conditioner transforms hair from frazzled to fabulous, leaving strands silky and luminous.
1 of 1
Revitalash Hair Advanced Hair Conditioner
Revitalash Hair Advanced Hair Conditioner is specifically designed to enhance the appearance and attractiveness of thin, fragile-looking hair.
Old Price: $180.00New Price:Free Shipping
1 of 1


text:
Carolina Holy Hip Hop Awards
Carolina All Stars Entertainment presents the first annual Carolina Holy Hip Hop Achievement Awards. Add a comment
BEC Recordings artist, MANAFEST, has been nominated for a Juno Award for "Contemporary Christian/Gospel Album of the Year" for his sophomore album, Glory.Add a comment
Add a comment
It's time for the 6th annual Texas Holy Hip Hop Achievement Awards! Celebrating 6 years of honoring individuals who continue to excel in the Christian hip hop music industry, we are growing closer to our national launch.
Add a comment
J.A.Z. (Justified And Zealous) formally of A.D.F. will be releasing a free download able CD entitled "J.A.Z. Classics and Throw backs"
APX, a Los Angeles Christian hip hop artist, is concerned about the state of mind in which the local youth are living with. APX says "our youth is disenfranchised and disengaged to success because of the widespread deception that is taking place in all facets of our media driven culture. Add a comment


text:
March 22, 2012
Small business owners or entrepreneurs who are football fans have likely (unless they are too busy) heard of the unprecedented suspensions and penalties levied by the NFL against the New Orleans Saints over an alleged bounty scheme. This article explains what lessons these business people can gather from this incident; as the article details, the NFL's relationship to the Saints is much like government regulators' relationship to businesses, and one rogue employee can bring harsh penalties upon their employer if their employer handles things poorly.
- Summary by FizzLaw Team
Read the Article at:
Rogue Employees of the Week – Saints Coach Sean Payton and Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams
Adam Whitney
FizzLaw is a product of Legal Services Management (LSM). Also included in the LSM portfolio is Business Law Network, LLC (BLN). BLN sponsors a network of independent lawyers serving middle market and small businesses, and Legati, a business litigation service providing fixed fee prices for litigation.