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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Vosilla who wrote (123760)	10/14/2012 4:06:52 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 149317

This guy is nuts. Skydiver successfully jumps from the edge of space Felix Baumgartner about to jump from his capsule about 23 miles above the Earth Sunday, Oct. 14, 2012. / CBS News Last Updated 2:45 p.m. ET ROSWELL, N.M. Extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner landed safely on Earth after a 24-mile jump from the stratosphere in a dramatic, daring feat that may also have marked the world's first supersonic skydive. Baumgartner came down in the eastern New Mexico desert minutes after jumping from his capsule 128,000 feet, or 24 miles, above Earth. He lifted his arms in victory shortly after landing, sending off loud cheers from onlookers and friends inside the mission's control center in Roswell, N.M. It wasn't immediately certain whether he had broken the speed of sound during his free-fall, which was one of the goals of the mission. Three hours earlier, Baumgartner, known as "Fearless Felix," had taken off in a pressurized capsule carried by a 55-story ultra-thin helium balloon. As he exited his capsule from high above Earth, he flashed a thumbs-up sign, aware that his feat was being shown on a live-stream on the Internet. During the ensuing jump from more than three times the height of the average cruising altitude for jetliners, Baumgartner was expected to hit a speed of 690 mph. Any contact with the capsule on his exit could have torn his pressurized suit, a rip that could expose him to a lack of oxygen and temperatures as low as minus-70 degrees. That could have caused lethal bubbles to form in his bodily fluids He activated his parachute as he neared Earth, gently gliding into the desert east of Roswell. Coincidentally, Baumgartner's attempted feat also marked the 65th anniversary of U.S. test pilot Chuck Yeager successful attempt to become the first man to officially break the sound barrier aboard an airplane. At Baumgartner's insistence, some 30 cameras recorded the event Sunday. While it had been pegged as a live broadcast, it was actually under a 20-second delay. Shortly after launch, screens at mission control showed the capsule as it rose above 10,000 feet, high above the New Mexico desert as cheers erupted from organizers. Baumgartner also could be seen on video checking instruments inside the capsule. Baumgartner's team included Joe Kittinger, who first attempted to break the sound barrier from 19.5 miles up in 1960, reaching speed of 614 mph. With Kittinger inside mission control Sunday, the two men could be heard going over technical details as the launch began. "You are right on the button, keep it right there," Kittinger told Baumgartner. An hour into the flight, Baumgartner had ascended more than 63,000 feet and had gone through a trial run of the jump sequence that will send him plummeting toward Earth. Ballast was dropped to speed up the ascent. Kittinger told him, "Everything is in the green. Doing great." This attempt marked the end of a five-year road for Baumgartner, a record-setting high-altitude jumper. He already made two preparation jumps in the area, one in March from 15 miles high and on in July from 18 miles high. It will also be the end of his extreme altitude jumping career; he has promised this will be his final jump. Dr. Jonathan Clark, Baumgartner's medical director, has told reporters he expects the pressurized spacesuit to protect him from the shock waves of breaking the sound barrier. If all goes well and he survives the jump, NASA could certify a new generation of spacesuits for protecting astronauts and provide an escape option from spacecraft at 120,000 feet, he said. Jumping from more than three times the height of the average cruising altitude for jetliners, Baumgartner's expects to hit a speed of 690 mph or more before he activates his parachute at 9,500 feet above sea level, or about 5,000 feet above the ground in southeastern New Mexico. The total jump should take about 10 minutes. The energy drink maker Red Bull, which is sponsoring the feat, has been promoting a live Internet stream of the event from nearly 30 cameras on the capsule, the ground and a helicopter. But organizers said there will be a 20-second delay in their broadcast of footage in case of a tragic accident. After the jump, Baumgartner says he plans to settle down with his girlfriend and fly helicopters on mountain rescue and firefighting missions in the U.S. and Austria. © 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

To: John Vosilla who wrote (123760)	10/14/2012 7:49:04 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Good question. Every crisis is different. A lot of people compare the Great Recession to the Great Depression. However, there were differences. What I'd say is that what we are seeing is what happens every time a country's leaders figure out that it's easier to print money to pay for favors for their constituency, rather than to raise taxes. When the people figure out they can get the government to give them lots of things and the leaders figure out printing money is the easiest way to do it, then this leads a country down a path, which leads step by step to a destruction of the financial system and the underlying currency. We're on that path now. In fact, we've been on this path for 41 years. Unfortunately, I think we're near the end of this whole game. Here's what Bloomberg News thinks: ----------- Housing Was at the Root of the Great Depression, Too By Evan Soltas Sep 25, 2012 9:29 AM ET bloomberg.com The U.S. economy slips into recession. The stock market takes a tumble as heady expectations for future growth cool. Interest rates fall as the Federal Reserve quickly trims the discount rate in hope of cushioning the business cycle. The low interest rate environment sets off a massive wave of home construction and an asset bubble in real estate. By the time the Federal Reserve takes action, the boom is completely out of control. Bank balance sheets and household savings have become dependent on the profound mispricing of real estate and other equity holdings. The heedless extent of leverage makes the financial system extremely vulnerable to capital losses. As the housing bubble implodes, it pushes the economy into a long, deep recession. This is the economic story of the last decade -- and of the 1920s. After a sharp deflationary recession at the end of World War I, the newly created Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, setting off a housing bubble of such an incredible scale that it dwarfs its recent counterpart. When the bubble ended, what seemed to be a calm and contained contraction turned violent, culminating in the macroeconomic implosion of the Great Depression. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz famously pinned the Great Depression on passive tightening of monetary policy, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and other scholars highlightedthe role of the gold standard and the collapse of international monetary order. But economists and commentators have largely overlooked the role of housing in the causation and intensification of the Great Depression. After an encore performance of macroeconomic calamity, this long-standing oversight deserves correction. A graph of the interest rates of the 1920s shows a U-shape. After curbing the inflationary excesses of World War I with a discount rate of 7 percent at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Fed brought interest rates to 3 percent and below by the middle of the decade. As expectations of growth returned, the persistence of low interest rates directed investment into real estate. Facilitated by a massive boom in mortgage financing, prices soared. In New York City, the value of real estate rose 80 percent in real terms, with even larger increases for higher-end speculative properties, according to one study. The magnitude of the 1920s bubble was even more impressive in terms of construction. Housing starts more than doubled, as did the real value of residential construction. That is four times as large as the housing boom of the 2000s. The culture of the 1920s also emphasized home ownership and home improvement, a grim precursor to sentiment in the last decade. Following a surge of interest, the magazine Better Homes and Gardens was founded in 1922, taking its name from a now-forgotten public policy initiative, the " Better Homes Movement." No fewer than three presidents -- Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover -- encouraged home ownership and investment through public campaigns. Government support led to increases in residential investment well beyond new construction. Responding to new demand, shipments of all of the items that go into home renovation -- such as wood flooring, bath tubs and kitchen sinks -- rose to tremendous heights. The stories of the 1920s and the 2000s are parallel even in the way the bubbles popped. In both instances, the housing market cooled early but gently, transferring speculation into stocks. The broader economy overheated and then fell into contraction, leading to sharp markdowns in real estate asset values, which precipitated true crisis. And in both cases, interest rates were forced to the zero lower bound as problems in the housing market disrupted a key component of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. The similar role played by housing in the Great Depression and Great Recession is remarkable. How is it, after all, that housing was a key player in the two largest recessions of the modern era? The connections merit new inquiry.

To: John Vosilla who wrote (123760)

10/15/2012 12:01:30 AM

From: tejek

Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 149317

Florida Election software Flips Vote: Losers Certified as Winners

Election officials always say "human error" is to blame, not computers. But Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher refuses to be silent about her concerns for elections including the upcoming presidential election. Bucher said: “You know the first thing that they tell you is you’re going to scare the voters,” Bucher said. “Well you know what… we’re scared too.”

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher is scared because her office discovered, and then proved, that a software error flipped vote totals between candidates, assigning losing candidate's the vote totals of the winning candidate.

See miami.cbslocal.com

Winners of at least two local races from March had previously been announced and certified, but had to be reversed because of the software problem.

Bucher is concerned that many problems will not be detected by the required audits, and that the presidential election could be affected. Id.

“The company didn’t own up to it real quickly and neither did the state. And we had to prove that it was a software error and we did so.”

Bucher said its time to hold Florida accountable– the State of Florida tests and certifies the voting machines for the state. Florida is one of just a handful of states that opted out of the federal program that certifies voting machines… deciding to do it on its own. Bucher said she is not confident in the system and would love to change the system she uses. She also said that the pickings are slim when it comes to finding a better choice.

“What we’re finding out, is that there are problems with almost every system in the United States,” said Bucher. Id.

Supervisor of Elections Bucher was also recently in the national news for being one of ten counties to discover apparently fraudulent voter registration forms (many filled out with similar handwriting) that had been submitted by the Florida' GOP's GOTV effort. Many of these registration forms, as outlined by the LA Times, were "slamming" - changing voters' addresses or party registration and other details without their knowledge (creating problems for these voters at the polls, and likely disfranchising them in a way that escapes exit poll detection).

Many on DU have known that audits don't catch all errors, and in any case arrive too late (the elections with the wrong winner certified were way back in March of this year, and just announced in the media locally in Florida yesterday). Bush v. Gore helps ensure that the clock will run out of time (in the Supreme Court's view) to conduct hand recounts because they must be done statewide and are interrupted by legal challenges. As a practical matter, the vote counts must be done right the first time, and software is a totally unreliable way to do this.

What's news here is that a prominent elections official is admitting what has been known by activists for a long time, and further admitting that she's scared, and not wanting to hide the truth from voters.