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“Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.”
After confirming that the A123 battery in the Fisker Karma has a battery safety issue and then figuring out a way to fix the problem, Fisker and the NHTSA have announced an official recall for 239 Karmas. The official reason for the recall is that:Within the high-voltage battery, certain hose clamps may have been positioned incorrectly during assembly. if positioned incorrectly, the battery compartment cover could interfere with the hose clamps, potentially causing a coolant leak from the cooling hoses.
Consequence: If coolant enters the battery compartment, an electrical short could occur possibly resulting in a fire.
The loan to Fisker is part of a $1 billion bet the Energy Department has made in two politically connected California-based electric carmakers producing sporty -- and pricey -- cutting-edge autos. Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore...
Fisker is more than a year behind rolling out its $97,000 luxury vehicle bankrolled in part with DOE money. While more are promised soon, just 40 of its Karma cars (below) have been manufactured and only two delivered to customers' driveways, including one to movie star Leonardo DiCaprio. Tesla's SEC filings reveal the start-up has lost money every quarter. And while its federal funding is intended to help it mass produce a new $57,400 Model S sedan, the company has no experience in a project so vast.
"The old neighborhood has changed. Hurley Brothers Funeral Home is now called Death 'n' Things."
Ron Paul's campaign is touting the endorsement of Phillip G. Kayser, an Iowa pastor who believes in imposing the death penalty on homosexuals, reports Talking Points Memo.
"We welcome Rev. Kayser's endorsement and the enlightening statements he makes on how Ron Paul's approach to government is consistent with Christian beliefs," said Paul's Iowa chairman, Drew Ivers, in a recent press release on Paul's campaign website.
"Difficulty in implementing Biblical law does not make non-Biblical penology just," wrote Kayser in a recent pamphlet. "But as we have seen, while many homosexuals would be executed, the threat of capital punishment can be restorative." Kayser added that homosexuals could be prosecuted only after the law was enacted.
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
Lieutenant Colonel (then Specialist Four) Alfred Rascon, distinguished himself by a series of extraordinarily courageous acts on 16 March 1966, while assigned as a medic to the Reconnaissance Platoon, Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry, 173d Airborne Brigade (Separate). While moving to reinforce its sister battalion under intense enemy attack, the Reconnaissance Platoon came under heavy fire from a numerically superior enemy force. The intense enemy fire from crew-served weapons and grenades severely wounded several point squad soldiers. Specialist Rascon, ignoring directions to stay behind shelter until covering fire could be provided, made his way forward. He repeatedly tried to reach the severely wounded point machine-gunner laying on an open enemy trail, but was driven back each time by the withering fire. Disregarding his personal safety, he jumped to his feet, ignoring flying bullets and exploding grenades to reach his comrade. To protect him from further wounds, he intentionally placed his body between the soldier and enemy machine guns, sustaining numerous shrapnel injuries and a serious wound to the hip. Disregarding his serious wounds he dragged the larger soldier from the fire-raked trail. Hearing the second machine-gunner yell that he was running out of ammunition, Specialist Rascon, under heavy enemy fire crawled back to the wounded machine-gunner stripping him of his bandoleers of ammunition, giving them to the machine-gunner who continued his suppressive fire. Specialist Rascon fearing the abandoned machine gun, its ammunition and spare barrel could fall into enemy hands made his way to retrieve them. On the way, he was wounded in the face and torso by grenade fragments, but disregarded these wounds to recover the abandoned machine gun, ammunition and spare barrel items, enabling another soldier to provide added suppressive fire to the pinned-down squad. In searching for the wounded, he saw the point grenadier being wounded by small arms fire and grenades being thrown at him. Disregarding his own life and his numerous wounds, Specialist Rascon reached and covered him with his body absorbing the blasts from the exploding grenades, and saving the soldier's life, but sustaining additional wounds to his body. While making his way to the wounded point squad leader, grenades were hurled at the sergeant. Again, in complete disregard for his own life, he reached and covered the sergeant with his body, absorbing the full force of the grenade explosions. Once more Specialist Rascon was critically wounded by shrapnel, but disregarded his own wounds to continue to search and aid the wounded. Severely wounded, he remained on the battlefield, inspiring his fellow soldiers to continue the battle. After the enemy broke contact, he disregarded aid for himself, instead treating the wounded and directing their evacuation. Only after being placed on the evacuation helicopter did he allow aid to be given to him. Specialist Rascon's extraordinary valor in the face of deadly enemy fire, his heroism in rescuing the wounded, and his gallantry by repeatedly risking his own life for his fellow soldiers are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.
“A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honors; the men it remembers.”
"Errol Flynn died on a seventy-foot yacht with a seventeen year old girl. Walter's always wanted to go that way, but he's going to settle for a seventeen footer and a seventy-year-old."
In a hotly-contested Republican race, it appears that only about half of Paul's supporters are Republicans. In Iowa, according to Rasmussen, just 51 percent of Paul supporters consider themselves Republicans. In New Hampshire, the number is 56 percent, according to Andrew Smith, head of the University of New Hampshire poll.
The same New Hampshire survey found that 87 percent of the people who support Romney consider themselves Republicans. For Newt Gingrich, it's 85 percent.
So who is supporting Paul? In New Hampshire, Paul is the choice of just 13 percent of Republicans, according to the new poll, while he is the favorite of 36 percent of independents and 26 percent of Democrats who intend to vote in the primary. Paul leads in both non-Republican categories.
"Paul is doing the best job of getting those people who aren't really Republicans but say they're going to vote in the Republican primary," explains Smith. Among that group are libertarians, dissatisfied independents and Democrats who are "trying to throw a monkey wrench in the campaign by voting for someone who is more philosophically extreme," says Smith.
Put simply, for too long we have been unwilling to distinguish right from wrong. “Live and let live” has too often become “do what you please.”
Bad choices have too often been defended as just different lifestyles. To be confident in saying something is wrong, is not a sign of weakness, it’s a strength.
The paleo (libertarian) strategy was a horrific mistake, both strategically and theoretically, though it apparently made some folks (such as [Lew] Rockwell and Paul) pretty rich selling newsletters predicting the collapse of Western civilization at the hands of the blacks, gays, and multiculturalists. The explicit strategy was abandoned by around the turn of the century, but not after a lot of bad stuff had been written in all kinds of places. There was way more than the Ron Paul newsletters. There was the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which was another major place publishing these sorts of views. They could also be found in a whole bunch of Mises Institute publications of that era... What the media has in their hands is only the tip of the iceberg of the really unsavory garbage that the paleo turn produced back then.
Through it all though, Ron Paul was a constant. He kept plugging away, first at the center of the paleo strategy as evidenced by the newsletters. To be clear, I am quite certain he did not write them. There is little doubt that they were written by [Lew] Rockwell and [Murray] Rothbard. People I know who were on the inside at the time confirm it and the style matches pretty well to those two and does not match to Ron Paul. Paul knows who wrote them too, but he’s protecting his long-time friend and advisor, unfortunately. And even more sadly, Rockwell doesn’t have the guts to confess and end this whole megillah. So although I don’t think Ron Paul is a racist, like Archie Bunker, he was willing to, metaphorically, toast a marshmallow on the cross others were burning.
Even after the paleo strategy was abandoned, Ron was still there walking the line between “mainstream” libertarianism and the winking appeal to the hard right courted by the paleo strategy. Paul’s continued contact with the fringe groups of Truthers, racists, and the paranoid right are well documented. Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message?
We can, however, take pains to make clear that some of Ron Paul’s past and current associations are rejected by libertarians who understand the “liberal” in libertarian and whose vision of a free society is one that is so clearly in conflict with racism, homophobia, antisemitism and all the rest that people like Stormfront would never even consider sending us a donation and we would recoil at being photographed with them.
Hillary will undoubtedly resign as Sec State in 2011.
The new Republican majority in the House allows Obama to blame all his failures on Republican "obstructionism", which he will (those he's still not blaming on Bush, anyway!). He will use his veto pen repeatedly.
Look for some kind of rule reform in caucus states like Iowa to prevent lopsided victories such as Obama's in 2008.To my knowledge it hasn't happened (but should) (-1)
I don't foresee an aggressive rollback of the Obama agenda, which will, nonetheless, anger the right and left respectively, as both too little and too much.
Let's see if Obama can make it from New Year's Day to the end of February without another vacation. Smart money says "No".
The Tea Party will hold another big rally in Washington in late Spring.Washington had one in April, I'd call that mid to late Spring. I'm going with a win on this one. (+1)
Obama will be conspicuously absent from Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day.
Any attempt for Republicans to reform Social Security will be characterized both by Democrats and their media arm, the MSM, as "Republicans want to starve grandma".
Look for the class envy card to be played a lot in 2011.
Another wash. Barry managed to hold twenty press conferences without requiring an ex-president at his side, but Jimmy managed to contain his vitriol to press releases and interviews. (Net 0)
Look for fewer press conferences with subsequently fewer opportunities for former presidents to outshine him. (Jimmy Carter will be so upset at the lost opportunity, he will write another book bashing Israel.)
Look for Air Force One to be spotted in countries all around the world. At least once or twice, it will be for an official presidential visit.
Dan Rather will finally find a copy of Barry Sotero's "birth certificate" stuck between two pages of GWB's Texas Air National Guard fitness reports.
Obama will play golf. (frequently)
Joe Biden will say something really stupid.
Al Gore will fly in a private jet, met by a limousine, to speak about how much we need to change our lifestyle, or at least to buy carbon credits from him.
And, last but not least, liberal trolls will still be clueless.
It’s his foreign policy that’s the problem; not so much some stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past.
Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously.
But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just “blowback,” for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.
I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the Holocaust.
There is much more information I could give you on the sheer lunacy of his foreign policy views. Let me just concentrate on one in specific. And I will state this with absolute certainty:
Ron Paul was opposed to the War in Afghanistan, and to any military reaction to the attacks of 9/11. He did not want to vote for the resolution. He immediately stated to us staffers, me in particular, that Bush/Cheney were going to use the attacks as a precursor for “invading” Iraq. He engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11, and pretty much forbade us staffers from engaging in any sort of memorial expressions, or openly asserting pro-military statements in support of the Bush administration.
On the eve of the vote, Ron Paul was still telling us staffers that he was planning to vote “No,” on the resolution, and to be prepared for a seriously negative reaction in the District. Jackie Gloor and I, along with quiet nods of agreement from the other staffers in the District, declared our intentions to Tom Lizardo, our Chief of Staff, and to each other, that if Ron voted No, we would immediately resign.
Ron was “under the spell” of left-anarchist and Lew Rockwell associate Joe Becker at the time, who was our legislative director. Norm Singleton, another Lew Rockwell fanatic agreed with Joe. All other staffers were against Ron, Joe and Norm on this, including Lizardo. At the very last minute Ron switched his stance and voted “Yay" (sic)...
He (Ron Paul) is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.
Fmr. Senior Aide, US Cong. Ron Paul, 1997 – 2003
Campaign Coordinator, Ron Paul for Congress, 1995/96
National Organizer, Draft Ron Paul for President, 1991/92
Travel Aide/Personal Asst. Ron Paul, Libertarian for President 1987/88
Dear MoveOn member,
Yesterday the tea party-led House voted mostly along party lines to increase taxes on 160 million people starting January 1.1 In other words, "Happy Holidays from the Tea Party." Bah, humbug!
Republican members of the House have caused the "Tea Party Tax Increase" of 2012 by ignoring the needs of the 99% in order to score political points. They rejected a bipartisan Senate compromise that extended the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, and prevented cuts for doctors who care for Medicare recipients.
Now they've left Washington for their holiday vacations, giving middle class families a tax increase for the holidays. It's critical that Rep. LaTourette hear from you today before his office closes for the holidays. If he doesn't act, the Tea Party Tax Increase of 2012 goes into effect on January 1.
If one were trying to dream up a way for the Energy Department to ensure fewer jobs, less energy, and higher costs, it would be hard to match the record of Secretary Chu. We have spent billions subsidizing inefficient solar- and wind-power companies with political connections; the results have been little or no new energy, but lots more federal debt. Thanks to Obama, the “alternative energy” industry is now discredited, as “millions of green jobs” have been downgraded to the status of “stimulus” and “investments.” Apparently, when crony capitalists and insider con men put the word “green” in front of their schemes, we are supposed to suspend moral judgment, as if they purchased medieval indulgences exempting them from scrutiny.
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. While Company 1 was conducting an operation along the axis of a narrow jungle trail, the leading company elements suffered numerous casualties when they suddenly came under heavy fire from a well concealed and numerically superior enemy force. Hearing the engaged marines' calls for more firepower, Sgt. Pittman quickly exchanged his rifle for a machinegun and several belts of ammunition, left the relative safety of his platoon, and unhesitatingly rushed forward to aid his comrades. Taken under intense enemy small-arms fire at point blank range during his advance, he returned the fire, silencing the enemy position. As Sgt. Pittman continued to forge forward to aid members of the leading platoon, he again came under heavy fire from 2 automatic weapons which he promptly destroyed. Learning that there were additional wounded marines 50 yards further along the trail, he braved a withering hail of enemy mortar and small-arms fire to continue onward. As he reached the position where the leading marines had fallen, he was suddenly confronted with a bold frontal attack by 30 to 40 enemy. Totally disregarding his safety, he calmly established a position in the middle of the trail and raked the advancing enemy with devastating machinegun fire. His weapon rendered ineffective, he picked up an enemy submachinegun and, together with a pistol seized from a fallen comrade, continued his lethal fire until the enemy force had withdrawn. Having exhausted his ammunition except for a grenade which he hurled at the enemy, he then rejoined his platoon. Sgt. Pittman's daring initiative, bold fighting spirit and selfless devotion to duty inflicted many enemy casualties, disrupted the enemy attack and saved the lives of many of his wounded comrades. His personal valor at grave risk to himself reflects the highest credit upon himself, the Marine Corps, and the U.S. Naval Service.
“A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honors; the men it remembers.”
This is due to the fact that, as you can see from the trailer above, the bad guys are basically Occupy Wall Streeters on steroids. Or, considering all the rioting, attacks against police, and pyrotechnics coming from the occupiers lately, just a better organized next step for the more violent members of the 99%.
Either way liberals seem off put by the idea that they might actually be the bad guys in a fictional piece of entertainment for once. Boo freakin hoo.
By the way, doesn’t government have a compelling public purpose in keeping the streets free of snow? Too boring for Bloomberg, who flew off to his weekend pad in Bermuda and left New Yorkers without second homes offshore to make the best of it. That’s the very model of a can-do technocrat in the age of Big Government: He can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue.
In many of these calendars, each window opens to reveal an image, a poem, or a portion of a story such as the story of the Nativity of Jesus. More elaborate Advent calendars have a small gift concealed in each window, such as a toy or a chocolate item.
“Still, we’re assured of how smart Obama is and that he’ll tell us his next genius idea as soon as he gets his tongue unstuck from the flagpole.”
Luke 2: 1-5 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, kicked up a bit of a storm on CNN's "Belief Blog" by declaring that "Jesus was a free marketer, not an occupier."Really, the only Tony Perkins I know was holed up at the Bates Motel in "Psycho". (But, I'm not saying they're related.) Jesus did not come, was not born into the world to proclaim the beauty of the free market system. (Sorry, Tony! Maybe he missed the whole "Render unto Caesar" thing?)
...there's the parable in which a landowner insists on paying all of his workers the same wage, whether they went on the clock early in the morning or an hour before quitting time. There are winners and losers in that story, but "diligence and determination" aren't the deciding factors.
The creator endowed humans with an endless ability to conscript Jesus and his words for their own ends...