Not the wad of cashish I was hoping for, but its the next best thing, some good time rock-n-roll music.  

A last-ditch American effort to head off a Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations faltered. President Obama tried to qualify his own call, just a year ago, for a Palestinian state. And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama's approach.

The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking.

New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.

"We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers," said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.

"Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade," Sum said.
...
Seniors 65 and older tended to return to or stay put in their jobs, accounting for the few U.S. employment gains in recent months. About 1 in 6 older Americans is now in the labor force -- the highest level since the 1960s, before more generous Social Security and Medicare benefits made it more attractive to retire. link

Let's scare more seniors into staying in the work force and move to implementing policies that guarantee more seniors will hang onto their jobs if possible. Unemployed or underemployed young children or grand children are paying for D.C. decisions as we speak.

A pair of House Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday to overturn the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling that freed corporations to spend unlimited money on elections.

Sponsored by Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Donna Edwards (D-Md.), the proposal would amend the Constitution to empower Congress and the states to limit corporate spending on political activities.

"Last year, the Supreme Court overturned decades of law and declared open season on our democracy," Conyers said in a news release. "It is individual voters who should determine the future of this nation, not corporate money."

Why 11 Democratic Senators and not 50 (all of them, less the three on the Super Committee) signed this effort spearheaded by Jeff Merkley is beyond me, but if more sign on it could be a crucial factor in actually pivoting away from deficit talk and toward jobs.

A group of senators today urged the Co-Chairs of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to take steps to ensure that Congress and the public get an independent estimate of their proposal's impact on jobs - and do no harm to employment in America.
...
Senators signing are: Jeff Merkley (OR), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Barbara Boxer (CA), Bernie Sanders (VT), Daniel Akaka (HA), Bob Menendez (NJ), Sherrod Brown (OH), Al Franken (MN), Mark Begich (AK), and Frank Lautenberg (NJ).

What a surprise. My sweet Claire's name is not on that list. No need for her to worry her beautiful mind about something like that.

Indeed, the African-American jobless rate in greater Saint Louis was ranked third-worse among the nation's top fifty metropolitan areas.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two days after repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy against gays serving openly in the military, the Obama administration was in court Thursday opposing a lawsuit seeking full severance pay for those dismissed under the law.
...
Judge Christine Odell Cook Miller said she probably will let the case continue and questioned why the government wouldn't pay now that the law has changed.

"Your timing is exquisite -- two days after the policy goes into effect eliminating 'don't ask, don't tell,' here we are," she said as she took the bench.

"I would consider this to be an unenviable argument to have at this time," she told the government's attorney later.
...
Miller said she would issue a ruling on the government's motion to dismiss by Oct. 15 after full review of the Justice Department's arguments, but her preliminary decision was to deny the motion. She warned Preheim and a uniformed Air Force attorney also at the defense table that they should be prepared for the case to move forward. She said it's probably appropriate to certify it for class action status, if the government really thinks it's worth it to continue fighting the case.

"I can't believe this is something the military wants to revisit now," she said. link

 "For Whom the Bell Tolls," Pilar, talking to Maria. Gender changed to reflect 2011.

I asked him the next day who was picked and he said that he didn't know put he was certain it wasn't him, everybody's was better than his he thought, as they were being read in class when I went to get him and he had heard some of the others.

More free money for incompetent rich a$$holes.

The EU internal markets commissioner, Michel Barnier, said the 16 banks that nearly failed the stress tests "are judged to be fragile and must also be strengthened further. We want the recapitalization for these banks to be by private means. The era of bailing out banks must end. But I cannot, of course, exclude the possibility that some of the above banks will require state aid. Atrios

"A fish rots from the head down."

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) delivered a tough message to conservatives who rejected his government funding bill on Wednesday: You voted to spend more money.

Four dozen House Republicans broke ranks and opposed a stopgap spending measure, killing the bill after Democrats pulled their support. GOP leaders are now scrambling to rewrite the measure, and Boehner hinted on Thursday that Republicans would not end up with more spending cuts as a result.

"They could vote 'no,' but what they're in essence doing is they are voting to spend more money, because that's exactly what will happen," Boehner told reporters when asked for his message to conservatives who deserted him.

The vote gave leverage to Democrats who want more federal disaster funding and oppose cuts to an energy program in the bill.

The Public Policy Institute of California, in a new statewide survey released Thursday, showed that 51% of voters oppose legalizing marijuana while 46% favor it.

SNIP

In the most recent survey, the San Francisco area was the only part of California that favored legalization. Most respondents in Southern California opposed it.

I couldn't find information about who voted which way.

Alito, Thomas... I can predict...

but I am curious about the rest, particularly Sotomayor and Kagan.

He also is quoted as saying it wasn't useful to look backwards either. (I believe we should look back. How else are we to learn from mistakes).

And still there are people out there that think the Republicans have the plan to fix the economy!

 As predicted before this a three man race. Perry may still be out by Oct.1st

 Here's a little news.

Barnett is a seriously intense guy.  

  1.  New Mexico      0-3  

Bought it on EBAY, and vendor has supplied a second copy but it has same problems.

Anyone else have these??? My DVD player service (Insignia) has been real helpful but it has boiled down to bad DVD's according to them.

Or this one...friendship. I'll know more tomorrow.

Sometimes, in the depths of darkness, a light springs forth. Oh, and she loves me. I was the one to lose faith, because of damned emails. We both like 2,800 meters and volcanic thermal springs, too. Read "For Whom the Bell Tolls," where Pilar talks about the three great loves... It's a later chapter, can't recall which...

Robert Jordan says to Maria, "But did thee feel the earth move?'' and she says yes, ''And then the earth moved. The earth never moved before?''  

No, they weren't talking about orgasm, but something deeper, more profound.

Secondary, "gray market" vendors who buy scarce drugs from small regional wholesalers, pharmacies or other sources and then market them to hospitals, often at many times the normal price. These sellers may not be licensed, authorized distributors.

Hospitals that buy scarce medicines from the "gray market" are taking a gamble.

Rather than reducing or eliminating regulations on polluters and the financial industry, etc. the government should be a job creator and fast track reputable companies so that they can go into producing generic drugs.

-- Only a half-dozen companies make the vast majority of injected generics. Even if other companies wanted to begin making a generic drug in short supply, they're discouraged by the lengthy, expensive process of setting up new manufacturing lines and getting FDA approval.

Result of lack of prescription drugs:

An Associated Press review of industry reports and interviews with nearly two dozen experts found at least 15 deaths in the past 15 months blamed on the shortages, either because the right drug wasn't available or because of dosing errors or other problems in administering or preparing alternative medications.

The shortages, mainly involving widely-used generic injected drugs that ordinarily are cheap, have been delaying surgeries and cancer treatments, leaving patients in unnecessary pain and forcing hospitals to give less effective treatments. That's resulted in complications and longer hospital stays.

source

House appraisal 2006 = 975k
House appraisal 2011 = 800k
Current Mortgage     = 775k
Bank wants 20% down  = 140k
New payment          = 1k less per month

So the banks get a huge bailout, QE1 and QE2 for the market and they want the consumer to give them 20% to refi with the giveaway they received from the consumer/taxpayer via the US gov't.  Get you coming in, and get you coming in again.

Not under water, 760 credit score (his wife's is higher).  The appraiser and bank 5 years ago said house was worth 975, now 800.    

Operation Twist is hoping millions will refinance to get some money in the economy moving.  Who the hell wants to take 150k out of their life savings to save 1k a month? Who the hell wants to give the banks one more penny?

It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed.

Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday.

In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper.

He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. But the experiment dealt with scenes being viewed through the eyes at the time of scanning, and it's not clear how much of the approach would apply to scenes generated by the brain instead, he said.

People shouldn't be worried about others secretly eavesdropping on their thoughts in the near future, since the technique requires a person to spend long periods in an MRI machine, he noted.

Another expert said he expected any mind-reading capability would appear only far in the future.