Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Vosilla who wrote (306072)	6/11/2011 9:23:24 AM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 306849

Weiner Confirms He Sent Private Messages to Girl, 17 By JENNIFER PRESTON: June 10, 2011 NY TIMES nytimes.com Representative Anthony D. Weiner said on Friday that he exchanged at least five private messages on Twitter this spring with a 17-year-old Delaware girl who became an admirer of his after hearing him speak during a high school trip to Washington. Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, did not provide copies of the messages, but said they were not inappropriate. “According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent,” Ms. Heller said. A member of the girl’s family who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her identity characterized the messages as “harmless” but expressed concern that Mr. Weiner had communicated privately with the teenager, a high school junior. The family was aware that there had been exchanges between Mr. Weiner and the girl but assumed that all of their conversations had taken place on a public Twitter feed. Then a scandal erupted last month over a photo Mr. Weiner sent of himself in his underwear to a college student. Last week, Mr. Weiner acknowledged that he had sent other explicit photos and messages to at least six women he met over social media. The family member said: “I am angry. This is surreal and unbelievable. It is absolutely crazy. We are just regular people who go to baseball games and basketball games, as ordinary and plain as can be.” In the past few days, the girl and her family have become subjects of intense interest in the news media. On Friday, the local police arrived at their home and asked the girl and her mother to bring the girl’s phone and computer to the police station so they could be checked to make sure no crime had occurred. The family member said the family complied, and did not expect any further action to be taken. The girl’s contact with Mr. Weiner started in early April, after her trip to Washington. The congressman spoke to her school group, and she began following him on Twitter, posting a public message saying how much she liked his speech. Two days later, Mr. Weiner began following her on Twitter. On her profile, she says she aspires to be president. In a private message he sent to her, he said: “How hip am I talking to a future president.” Delighted that she had heard directly from a congressman, the girl wrote a public post on her Twitter feed: “talking to Rep Weiner from New York right now! is my life real?” At the time, a group of conservatives was monitoring Mr. Weiner’s Twitter activity, after noticing that he was sending messages to a pornographic star from Tennessee. When members of the group saw the girl’s post, suggesting she was engaging in a private conversation with Mr. Weiner, they alerted the congressman that they were watching him. “@RepWeiner new pal is a high school girl. First porn actresses now little girls. Weird.” According to the girl’s family member, people in the group also copied the girl on some of the messages they sent to him, so she sent Mr. Weiner a private message telling him that she felt she was being harassed. He apologized to her in a private message, and removed her from the list of people he followed on Twitter. About a month later, Mr. Weiner sent out a public message saying he wanted to attract more followers on Twitter and offered to follow people on his account if they wanted him to. The girl responded to the appeal and posted a public message to him: “Don’t forget me. I used to follow you.” On May 16, he began following the girl again, and over the next 10 days they had three private message exchanges, the family member said. One was about baseball. In another, he replied to a question she had about legislation by jokingly asking for her advice, the family member said. His third message to her was in response to a link she posted to a YouTube video of his giving a speech, with the message: “My true love.” In a blog post on Tumblr, she later shared the contents of that private message from him. In it, Mr. Weiner appeared to liken himself to a superhero. “I came back strong,” he wrote. “Large. Tights and cape. ...” On the Tumblr blog post she added, “My favorite Congressman.”

To: John Vosilla who wrote (306072)	6/11/2011 11:11:16 AM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 306849

Palin/Obama Paper Trails and Media Hypocrisy June 10, 2011 By Stanley Kurtz nationalreview.com The deafening roar of nothingness emerging from the Sarah Palin email trove points up the media’s hypocritical lack of interest in Barack Obama’s pre-presidential record. Just as Palin’s emails were released, Slate’s David Weigel pointed out that Barack Obama’s State Senate records are not available. Weigel quotes Obama’s statement to the effect that he didn’t have the staff or financial resources to preserve office paperwork. As a result, Obama claims, his State Senate records may have been thrown out. In fact, Obama could easily have preserved his State Senate records had he wanted to. The papers of many Illinois legislators are preserved at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I know, because I went through many a box there. The records are in various states of completeness and (dis)organization. Often, chaotic boxes of papers have been handed over to the archivists with little effort at cataloguing. Nonetheless, many records from state legislative offices are preserved. Some of the most interesting revelations in Radical-in-Chief emerge from Jeremiah Wright’s correspondence with Howard Brookins, an Illinois State Senator who was a member of Rev. Wright’s congregation around the time Wright and Obama first connected. I found the Wright-Brookins correspondence in Brookins’ archived records at the Abraham Lincoln Library. If Brookins could preserve his records there, Obama could have preserved his as well. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made this point in 2008, saying “Our investigation suggests Senator Obama could have had his records archived so that they are available to the public, but, to this day, he does not want a complete paper trail of his time in the Illinois State Senate. Where are his office records?” Radical-in-Chief is filled with revelations about Obama’s past dug out of archived records. Yet none of the mainstream outlets frantically searching through Palin’s emails has reported on these revelations, much less disputed my account of their significance. The revelations in Radical-in-Chief include a reconstruction of socialist conferences Obama himself admits attending in the mid-1980's; heretofore unknown documents from Obama’s initial stint as a community organizer in Chicago; documents closely tying Obama to a hard-left community organizer training institute; documents detailing Obama’s ties to ACORN and the ACORN-controlled New Party–and revealing his public account of those ties to be false; documents shedding new light on Obama’s foundation work and his sustained political alliances with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright; documents shedding light on Obama’s endorsement by the Democratic Socialists of America in 1996, and much more. I’m not the only one who’s noticed Obama’s desire to hide his record, as well as the reluctance of mainstream outlets to investigate such sources as do exist. Obama fan and sympathetic Obama biographer Sasha Abramsky writes: Much of the media, including his biographers, have concluded that the community organizing period of Obama’s life should be accorded relatively little space, assuming those years simply reflected the radical foibles of a young man trying to find himself. Abramsky goes on to argue, in opposition to the media’s implicit judgement, that Obama’s community organizing years were actually the key to who he became. I agree. Yet the media continues to ignore important documentary revelations from a sitting president’s political past, while devoting enormous attention to the emails of an unsuccessful candidate for the vice-presidency. Isn’t it obvious that the media’s lack of interest in Obama’s radical past–noticed even by a supporter like Abramsky–is a simple case of political protection, not to mention journalistic abdication?

To: John Vosilla who wrote (306072)	6/11/2011 3:56:59 PM
From: JBTFD	Respond to of 306849

Ron Paul get the republican nomination? Like that's gonna happen.

To: John Vosilla who wrote (306072)	6/12/2011 7:44:59 PM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 306849

NRC chief faces fallout from scrapping Yucca Mountain By DINA CAPPIELLO and MATTHEW DALY The Associated Press June 12, 2011 chron.com WASHINGTON — In the two years that Gregory Jaczko has led the nation's independent nuclear agency, his actions to delay, hide and kill work on a disputed dump for high-level radioactive waste have been called "bizarre," `'unorthodox" and "illegal." These harsh critiques haven't come just from politicians who have strong views in favor of the Yucca Mountain waste site in Nevada. They've come from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's own scientists and a former agency chairman. An inspector general's report released last week exposed the internal strife under Jaczko. The internal watchdog said he intimidated staff members who disagreed with him and withheld information from members of the commission to gain their support. The tactics disclosed in the investigative report are just the latest in a saga unfolding since President Barack Obama put the former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is Yucca's leading opponent, at the helm of the agency in May 2009. Less than a year after Jaczko was named chairman, the Energy Department sought to pull back its application to construct the dump. Since then, Jaczko has made a series of decisions that have aided the administration's goal of shutting down Yucca Mountain. His purported reasons for doing so have come under attack by Congress, his fellow commissioners and in-house experts as being contrary to the 1982 law that requires the NRC to review the government's plans for an underground repository in Nevada for the country's spent nuclear fuel. Emails and documents gathered by investigators on three House committees and reviewed by The Associated Press, along with interviews with NRC staff members, paint an even more damning portrait of the NRC leader. They also raise questions about whether the agency's independence and scientific integrity have been compromised to advance a political agenda. "He was put there to stop Yucca Mountain, and that is what he is doing," said former NRC chairman and commissioner Dale E. Klein. Klein was appointed chairman in 2006 by President George W. Bush and left in March 2010. The revelations come after the Japanese nuclear crisis exposed the risks associated with storing spent fuel in pools at a nuclear plant and after reports showing that $15 billion has been spent on Yucca Mountain even though it may never open. "These actions not only violated the president's own highly promoted principles and directives on scientific integrity, transparency, and openness, but they have increased taxpayer liabilities ..., left nuclear waste sitting at reactor sites across the country with no plan for disposal and ultimately threatened the long-term potential of nuclear power," said Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas. Hall is chairman of the House science committee, one of three panels conducting investigations. Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., put it more bluntly: "Science, existing law, and the need for long-term nuclear waste storage seem to be missing from this discussion," he said. Both Jaczko and Obama have pledged to let public policy be shaped by science over politics. But last October, the NRC chief instructed his staff to stop work on one of the most critical questions surrounding Yucca Mountain: whether the stored radioactive waste would spoil groundwater in 10,000 years and would expose people to unsafe amounts of radiation for a million years. After fighting Jaczko for its release, congressional aides who reviewed a draft of the analysis say it showed that NRC experts determined Yucca was safe. While Jaczko had not seen the document, his decision to halt the review meant the staff's conclusions were stripped from the report. Klein, the former NRC chairman, told the AP in an interview that "the decision on safety is the independent regulator's job. They have not been given the opportunity to make the determination." Jaczko says his actions are consistent with commission policy, and he has never expressed any personal views on the Yucca Mountain project. In an AP interview, Jaczko declined to answer detailed questions but said all his actions were aimed at nuclear safety. The inspector general's report issued Friday found he had not broken the law. Reid, his former boss, said in a statement that House Republicans should move on and help find "real solutions for safely managing nuclear waste." "Yucca Mountain is dead," he added. But that report did not examine another decision Jaczko made related to Yucca: a decision to delay a vote on whether the Energy Department could withdraw its application for the project. Nearly a year after a separate nuclear licensing board ruled the application couldn't be withdrawn, the commission has yet to weigh in, even though a majority of commissioners have submitted their positions in writing. Jaczko rejected the notion that politics is involved in the year-long delay. "Is the decision-making process taking a long time?" Jaczko said in the interview. "Yes. Is that unusual? Not entirely." These two decisions have caused longtime staff members to become suspicious of Jaczko's motives. Before Jaczko shut down their efforts, agency experts were on track to deliver two of the safety reviews ahead of schedule. But in a memo issued June 11, 2010, Jaczko told the staff not to issue them early, a move that had employees asking if he had crossed a line. Four months later he shut down the work altogether. Four of the most senior experts working on Yucca objected to Jaczko's move, saying it was a policy matter the full five-member commission needed to consider. Two commissioners agreed, but when one of them filed a motion to reverse Jaczko's decision, two other commissioners declined to participate. The two commissioners who declined to participate later told the inspector general that Jaczko did not fully disclose that his plans would terminate the work. When commissioner William Magwood, a Democrat, confronted Jaczko about misleading him, the inspector general reported that Jaczko's reply was: "You should have asked." Senior scientists with the high-level waste division also objected to a memo drafted by Christine Haney, a top NRC manager, on Feb. 4 providing the commission with an update on their work to close down the review. The memo, they argued, failed to mention that Jaczko was behind the decision to shut down the scientific evaluation. "Every time I tried to find a different way to say chairman directed or the commission directed, I was told I could not say that," said Janet Kotra, a senior project manager who has been with the NRC for 27 years and worked full time on Yucca Mountain since 1993. "I could not include a declarative sentence that the chairman directed staff to terminate the review." She called it "a most unorthodox process." Kotra's boss, King Stablein, supported her objection in correspondence to Haney and attached to the final memo. "Staff has struggled on a daily basis to figure out how to cope with this bizarre situation in a manner which would enable staff to maintain its integrity," he wrote on Feb. 3, 2011. Haney, through a spokesman, declined to comment on the matter, and referred to her written response to staffers. It said that the chairman's decision fell outside the purpose of the memo and that the closure was "well vetted" by the commission. Senior NRC officials played down the dispute over the memo in an interview with the AP, saying Jaczko has never shied away from his role in terminating the licensing review. The officials also said the objections of the staff were shared with the full commission. Other staffers put their opinions in even stronger terms. In an email dated Oct. 18, 2010, and marked "not for public disclosure", Daniel Graser, a data administrator for the board reviewing the Yucca application asked a board member and chief counsel for clarification on what he could do if he perceived that an action was illegal. "If we believe that a senior official is violating a federal law, what obligation do we have to report that, and, who do we report it to?" he asked. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, chairman of a House spending panel that oversees the NRC's budget, has called for Jackzo to step down and said his actions have damaged the NRC's reputation. "It's supposed to be an apolitical organization that bases its decisions on science and facts and those kinds of things, and it has been that for many years," Simpson said. "Jaczko has allowed politics to enter the picture, and with many members of Congress, the credibility of the NRC has gone downhill." Read more: chron.com

To: John Vosilla who wrote (306072)	6/12/2011 7:50:12 PM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 306849

Cusack "great kid who made a mistake," councilor says Another Weiner/Clinton/Kennedy in the making By Sue Scheible The Patriot Ledger Jun 11, 2011 patriotledger.com BRAINTREE — Town Councilor John C. Mullaney came to the defense of embattled state Rep. Mark Cusack Saturday, calling the 26-year-old legislator "a great kid ... he's young, he made a mistake, and I hope he survives this." Cusack, a freshman legislator from Braintree, is under investigation by the office of House Speaker Robert DeLeo for an incident that allegedly took place a month ago inside the House chamber after a late-night budget debate session. Media reports said that Cusack, who was sworn into office less than six months ago, was under investigation for allegedly engaging in inappropriate actions with a female staff member of another lawmaker, when the two were discovered by a court officer in the empty chamber. Cusack, who has not spoken to the media since the reports surfaced a day ago, could not be reached for comment. DeLeo's office confirmed Friday that it is investigating an incident that took place inside the House chamber at a time no one is expected to be here. The speaker's office offered a one-line official statement, saying ‘‘the House will conduct an internal review of his matter.’’ Charles B. Ryan, Braintree Council president and councilor at large, and councilor Charles C. Kokoros, Council vice president, declined comment. Mullaney noted the youth and inexperience of Cusack, under sometimes demanding political conditions, and said, "Becoming a state representative is the beginning of your political life, and there are a lot of inexperienced people who go in there. "It is a learning experience, and I hope that Mark will learn from this, because he is highly intelligent, his family has done a lot for the town of Braintree and he is a wonderful kid." Mullaney said he considered running for the state representative's seat that Cusack won and that he spoke with him at candidates' forums and was very impressed. "Young people sometimes do foolish things, and if he survives this, he will be an excellent legislator," Mullaney said. A former union president who worked at the federal Internal Revenue Service for 35 years, Mullany said he had represented people accused of violations of standards and rules, and that the "biggest mistake someone can make is not telling the truth." Some media reports said that Cusack gave the name of another legislator when he was discovered by a court officer in the chamber after hours, Mullaney said. "If that is true, I am sure Mark will be telling the truth from now on, as the Speaker's office does an investigation," Mullaney said. "The one rule I tell people in trouble with the IRS is that you should tell the truth at all times. The crime is never as bad as not telling the truth about it." Read more: patriotledger.com Read more: patriotledger.com

To: John Vosilla who wrote (306072)	6/12/2011 8:14:17 PM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 306849

The Washington Post thinks it's "harassment" to request Michael Mann's files from the University of Virginia (their Memorial Day editorial washingtonpost.com but it's cool with requesting and obtaining and asking for citizen-journalists to go through 24,000 of the State of Alaska's emails involving Sarah Palin.