January 2013 archive

Jan 22 2013

In Memoriam: David W. Smith, Translator, 1957 – 2013

It is with the heaviest of hearts that I bring this sad news, Translator, aka Dr. David W. Smith died this past Sunday, January 20.

Dr. David W. Smith, 55, of Richmond, KY, passed away Sunday, January 20, 2013.

Dr. Smith was born in Fort Smith Arkansas on March 2, 1957, to Roy W. and Geraldine Sandlin Smith. He was a self employed Scientific Consultant.

Survivors include his three sons: Geoff, Justin and Jon Smith; his former wife: Teena Smith; one brother: Richard Smith; as well as a host of other family and friends.

Private services will be conducted at a later date.

The Combs, Parsons & Collins Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

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David was our friend and fellow traveler through the universe who shared with us his passion for science, music and cooking. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and friends. We grieve with you.

Though we share this humble path, alone

How fragile is the heart

Oh give these clay feet wings to fly

To touch the face of the stars

Breathe life into this feeble heart

Lift this mortal veil of fear

Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears

We’ll rise above these earthly cares

Cast your eyes on the ocean

Cast your soul to the sea

When the dark night seems endless

Please remember me…

May we all find Peace. Blessed Be.

Jan 22 2013

Congressional Game of Chicken: Fixing Filibuster Don’t Stop Now, Part VII

Don’t Stop Now! Call Reid’s office at 202-224-3542, and tell him to include the talking filibuster and/or flipping the burden of the filibuster.

Reform the Filbuster

Sign the Petition

Filibuster

TheMomCat–

Will Harry Reid kill real filibuster reform? Vote is tomorrow, January 22.

1/21/2013 10:00am by Gaius Publius

(W)e should be calling Harry Reid’s office today and tomorrow (early morning EST):

    Harry Reid:

    (202) 224-3542

Reid also has four Nevada offices, all with phones. If you call:

  1. Tell him (politely) to act like a Democrat instead of a Beltway insider & Mitch McConnell’s virtual golfing buddy.
  2. Tell him to support the Merkley-Udall proposal and nothing less.
  3. Say if he doesn’t get real filibuster reform passed in the Senate, he owns the silent filibuster for the next two years. Every Republican obstruction will be his obstruction as well.

Let’s give him naming rights if he fails us like he did two years ago. The Senator Harry Reid Silent Filibuster™, brought to you by Senator Harry Reid, the Republicans’ new best friend in the Senate.

Other Dem senators who may be wavering:

Baucus Max MT D (202) 224-2651
Boxer Barbara CA D (202) 224-3553
Feinstein Dianne CA D (202) 224-3841
Heitkamp Heidi ND D (202) 224-2043
Hirono Mazie HI D (202) 224-6361
Leahy Patrick VT D (202) 224-4242
Reed Jack RI D (202) 224-4642

Make the call, please. Today… early (EST). Make several. I’d be shocked if the folks in the $800 suits hit the chambers anytime before 10 or 11am – gotta have time for those lobbyist breakfasts and all.

Harry Reid seeks middle path on filibuster

By MANU RAJU, Politico

1/17/13 6:41 PM EST

The contents of a filibuster reform package are not yet finalized, sources say, and Reid is still trying to cut a bipartisan deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to avert a partisan showdown on the floor next week. But Reid seems to have discarded one of the more far-reaching proposals sought by liberals – forcing senators to actually carry out a filibuster – because of fears that the plan would effectively kill the potent delaying tactic used frequently by the minority party.

…

Reid’s most pressing demand is to eliminate filibusters used to prevent debate on legislation from starting. He also wants to end filibusters used to prevent the Senate from convening conference committees with the House. And he’s eager to pare back the use of filibusters on certain presidential nominations.

Senators could still filibuster in any number of situations under this approach. But Reid is weighing whether to shift the burden of the filibuster from those who are seeking to defeat it onto those who are threatening to wage one. Rather than requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, Reid is considering requiring at least 41 senators to sustain a filibuster. That would amount to a subtle shift to force opponents to ensure every senator is present in order to mount a filibuster.

…

Still, what Reid is considering would fall short of a plan pushed by Sens. Merkley, Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who want to require anyone who is threatening to filibuster to actually carry one out on the floor – much like in the infamous movie classic, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Under their plan, if a filibuster is not defeated – but at least 51 senators want to overcome the delay tactic – senators who are obstructing would go to the floor and carry out the talk-a-thon. But once the senators stop talking, the Senate could overcome the filibuster with just 51 votes, rather than the 60 that is currently required.

Republicans and a handful of Democrats oppose this approach because they fear that it would effectively usurp the power of an individual senator to filibuster and effectively lower the threshold to overcome a filibuster from 60 votes to 51.

To repeat-

(W)e should be calling Harry Reid’s office today and tomorrow (early morning EST):

    Harry Reid:

    (202) 224-3542

Reid also has four Nevada offices, all with phones. If you call:

  1. Tell him (politely) to act like a Democrat instead of a Beltway insider & Mitch McConnell’s virtual golfing buddy.
  2. Tell him to support the Merkley-Udall proposal and nothing less.
  3. Say if he doesn’t get real filibuster reform passed in the Senate, he owns the silent filibuster for the next two years. Every Republican obstruction will be his obstruction as well.

Let’s give him naming rights if he fails us like he did two years ago. The Senator Harry Reid Silent Filibuster™, brought to you by Senator Harry Reid, the Republicans’ new best friend in the Senate.

Other Dem senators who may be wavering:

Baucus Max MT D (202) 224-2651
Boxer Barbara CA D (202) 224-3553
Feinstein Dianne CA D (202) 224-3841
Heitkamp Heidi ND D (202) 224-2043
Hirono Mazie HI D (202) 224-6361
Leahy Patrick VT D (202) 224-4242
Reed Jack RI D (202) 224-4642

Make the call, please. Today… early (EST). Make several. I’d be shocked if the folks in the $800 suits hit the chambers anytime before 10 or 11am – gotta have time for those lobbyist breakfasts and all.

Jan 22 2013

Late Night Karaoke

Jan 21 2013

OMIGOD! Had I Known Obama Would Mention Seneca Falls I Would Have Listened

Seneca Falls is the small hamlet in update New York where activists held the first women’s rights convention in July 1848. Activists Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass were among the 300 people who spent two days discussing ways to promote women’s equality.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Actually the women’s suffrage movement was initiated with a meeting of 5 women in a church.  The building is only a shell now and the “park” [Women’s Rights National Park] gets few visitors.  There is little to see unless you have some idea of the significance of what you are looking at.

Best,  Terry

Jan 21 2013

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these featured articles-

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Jan 21 2013

“Keep the Faith,” says Joe Biden to those concerned about Global Warming

What faith is that, Joe?  Isn’t this like the preacher inveighing against sin while immersed in corruption and degradation?

If you aren’t despairing of the future, you can’t be sentient.

Will the U.S. Surpass Saudi Arabia in Oil Production?

Recent news reports said yes, based on the Executive Summary of a big international report by the International Energy Agency.

And that’s just oil.  Does anybody need to know about fracking natural gas that is giving firewater a whole new meaning?  Natural gas may be more harmful to the environment without the new technology than even coal mining because escaping methane is a vastly more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Here’s what’s clear: While we debate and ponder the consequences, global energy consumption continues to grow exponentially.

http://www.popularmechanics.co…

Meanwhile purported environmentalists pushing environment-damaging, high cost, sometime [intermittent] power fight tooth and nail against baseload renewable power that is vastly more potent and cheaper than all other sources combined.

Compare the hottest hour of the hottest day in Death Valley to the potency of a run-of-the-mill supervolcano like Yellowstone that could potentially exterminate human life in North America.  Which would you say likely is the more powerful?

Our leading revered environmentalists would rather see a whole gawddam forest be burnt down along with the woodland critters and a few firefighters and waft tons of CO2 and toxins into the atmosphere rather than gather the kindling and generate power with biomass rather than coal because the former is natural somehow.

One of the ultimate clean power plants is in Iceland where a trash burning facility adds heat to the tepid waters of a warm spring in the tiny, isolated hamlet of Husavik to squeeze out 3MW of power from such sources.  The plant is currently undergoing modernization after it was bought by an Aussie company pushing advanced geothermal technology around the world for deriving power from low temperature geothermal waters.

But that’s not good enough for our megathinking environmentalists who prefer to drill many miles deep into the bowels of the earth for more power at enormous cost beyond the limits of current technology.

Mother Earth is a most bounteous lady but she can be turned into a mass killer beyond compare by mere mortals when her simple rules are ignored.

Who says we are an intelligent species?

Best,  Terry

 

Jan 21 2013

Cartnoon

Jan 21 2013

On This Day In History January 21

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 21 is the 21st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 344 days remaining until the end of the year (345 in leap years).

On this day in 1911, the first Monte Carlo Rally takes place.

The Monte Carlo Rally (officially Rallye Automobile Monte-Carlo) is a rallying event organised each year by the Automobile Club de Monaco who also organises the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix and the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique . The rally takes place along the French Riviera in the Principality of Monaco and southeast France.

From its inception in 1911 by Prince Albert I, this rally, under difficult and demanding conditions, was an important means of testing the latest improvements and innovations to automobiles. Winning the rally gave the car a great deal of credibility and publicity. The 1966 event was the most controversial in the history of the Rally. The first four finishers driving three Mini-Coopers, Timo Makinen, Rauno Aaltonen and Paddy Hopkirk, and Roger Clark‘s 4th-placed Ford Cortina “were excluded for having iodine vapour, single filament bulbs in their standard headlamps instead of double-filament dipping bulbs.”  This elevated Pauli Toivonen (Citroen ID) into first place overall. The controversy that followed damaged the credibility of the event. The headline in Motor Sport: “The Monte Carlo Fiasco.”

From 1973 to 2008 the rally was held in January as the first event of the FIA World Rally Championship, but since 2009 it has been the opening round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC) programme. As recently as 1991, competitors were able to choose their starting points from approximately five venues roughly equidistant from Monte Carlo (one of Monaco’s administrative areas) itself. With often varying conditions at each starting point, typically comprising dry tarmac, wet tarmac, snow, and ice, sometimes all in a single stage of the rally. This places a big emphasis on tyre choices, as a driver has to balance the need for grip on ice and snow with the need for grip on dry tarmac. For the driver, this is often a difficult choice as the tyres that work well on snow and ice normally perform badly on dry tarmac.

The Automobile Club de Monaco confirmed on 19 July 2010 that the 79th Monte-Carlo Rally would form the opening round of the new Intercontinental Rally Challenge season. To mark the centenary event, the Automobile Club de Monaco have also confirmed that Glasgow, Barcelona, Warsaw and Marrakesh has been selected as start points for the rally.

Jan 21 2013

When Fed Presidents start talking like Communists…

Dallas, we have a problem.

How to Cut Megabanks Down to Size

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: January 19, 2013

On Wednesday, in a speech in Washington, Mr. (Richard W.) Fisher (the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) laid out a compelling proposal for shrinking financial giants in order to protect taxpayers. He suggested that megabanks be chopped into pieces, so that no one of them could endanger the financial system if it ran into trouble.

…

Why? Mr. Fisher argued that megabanks not only threaten taxpayers with bailouts, but that their continuing failure to lend is also thwarting the Fed’s efforts to jump-start the economy by keeping interest rates low. “I submit that these institutions, as a result of their privileged status, exact an unfair tax upon the American people,” he told his audience. “Moreover, they interfere with the transmission of monetary policy and inhibit the advancement of our nation’s economic prosperity.”

Smaller institutions, by contrast, have continued to lend in the post-crisis years, especially to the kinds of modest-size businesses that create so many jobs across the country. According to figures compiled by Mr. Fisher’s colleagues at the Dallas Fed, community banks – defined as those with no more than $10 billion in assets – hold less than one-fifth of the nation’s banking assets. Nevertheless, they hold more than half of the industry’s small-business loans.

…

There are roughly 5,600 commercial banking institutions in the country, Mr. Fisher noted. Some 5,500 of them are community banks. While these organizations account for 98.6 percent of all banks, they hold only 12 percent of total industry assets. They are routinely allowed to fail if they get into trouble. Few of them did during the crisis.

Contrast these figures with those of the nation’s 12 largest banks, whose assets range from $250 billion to $2.3 trillion. They account for 0.2 percent of all banks but hold 69 percent of industry assets. These are the banks that enjoy all the perquisites of the federal safety net: significantly lower borrowing costs and a taxpayer backstop, for example.

…

Understanding that it will be a tough battle to break up the megabanks, Mr. Fisher suggests that in the meantime, only commercial banking operations receive protection from the federal safety net in the form of federal deposit insurance. An institution’s other activities – securities trading, insurance operations and real estate, for example – should fall outside any backstop. Furthermore, he recommends that these banks require customers and trading partners to sign an agreement stating that they understand the business they are conducting is not covered by any federal protection or guarantees. That would begin to reduce the perception that all of these institutions’ counterparties would be protected in a disaster.

Jan 21 2013

Revisiting the Mountaintop

I am an activist for my people.  As I have grown older, I have more likely performed my activism with my words, which is the tool I have had at hand.

Sometimes I am repetitive.  I am a teacher.  Some lessons are hard.  That’s a clue to the fact that they are important.  Important lessons need to be taught more than once, again and again, time and again, using different words, approaching the issue from different points of view.  That’s what I do.  Some of you claim that I do it “ad nauseam.”  It’s your nausea, not mine.

Many of you know me as the transsexual woman (or whatever you call me…I’m sure that it is not favorable in many instances).  Some of you know me as an artist or a poet.  Some of you see the teacher in me.  Or the glbt activist and PFLAG parent.  I am all of these.  I am a human being.

I was born in a place and time.  I have absorbed the life lessons presented to me since then.  I am still learning.

I’ve tried to pass on what I have learned.  I continue to make that effort, in whatever new venues are available, wherever I can find an opened eye or ear.

Jan 21 2013

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning


Burning 2

Jan 21 2013

Late Night Karaoke

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