US States With the Most Millionaires 2011
by Paul Toscano
Friday, October 28, 2011
Each year, Phoenix Marketing International analyzes national data on millionaire households to reveal which U.S. states attract the most high-income families. This information is being published first on CNBC.com.
The overall number of millionaire households in the U.S. has increased nationwide for the second time in two years. In 2011, there were 5.94 million millionaire households, compared with 5.56 million households a year earlier, an increase of approximately 6.8 percent. Nearly every U.S. state saw an increase in its total number of millionaires, adding thousands of households to millionaire status, according to the new numbers from Phoenix Marketing.
The study defines millionaire households as those with $1 million or more in investable or liquid assets (excluding sponsored retirement plans and real estate). Overall, 5.08 percent of U.S. households claim millionaire status, up from last year but still short of the 2007 high of 5.25 percent.
David Thompson, managing director of Phoenix Marketing, notes that "this is the closest it's ever been between the top two states," adding that "all of the top 10 states increased their millionaire ratios during the past year, which underscores that the richest states keep getting richer."
In past reports, Thompson has noted that "small states with large concentrations of highly educated professionals and business owners are key ingredients to growing wealth," and that states with a large proportion of millionaires tend to share these characteristics.
So, which states are home to the most millionaires?
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7. Virginia
Percentage of households: 6.26%
Millionaire households: 195,006
Total households: 3,113,444
Percentage in 2010: 5.94%
Millionaire households: 180,638
Percentage in 2009: 5.51%
Millionaire households: 166,596
8. New Hampshire
Percentage of households: 6.06%
Millionaire households: 31,159
Total households: 514,053
Percentage in 2010: 5.79%
Millionaire households: 29,790
Percentage in 2009: 5.34%
Millionaire households: 27,562
9. California
Percentage of households: 6.01%
Millionaire households: 750,686
Total households: 12,487,377
Percentage in 2010: 5.66%
Millionaire households: 716,316
Percentage in 2009: 5.28%
Millionaire households: 662,735
10. District of Columbia
Percentage of households: 5.88%
Millionaire households: 15,603
Total households: 265,558
Percentage in 2010: 5.53%
Millionaire households: 14,533
Percentage in 2009: 5.00%
Millionaire households: 13,028
読者のコメント
Yahoo! User 4 hours ago
Investible Assets? So, I can borrow $1M and invest it and I'm a millionaire? (assets=liabilities+equity or equity=assets-liabilities) Would love to see where this data is coming from. The press is a major culprit in every mess we get into. Most of what I read these days is hogwash and this is just more of it. Be skeptical of everything you read and try to understand the motivation of the writer(s).
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コダックが倒産
Kodak files for bankruptcy, secures $950 million lifeline
Reuters – 27 minutes ago
(Reuters) - Eastman Kodak Co, which invented the hand-held camera and helped bring the world the first pictures from the moon, has filed for bankruptcy protection, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America's best-known companies.
The more than 130-year-old photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going.
The loan and bankruptcy protection from U.S. trade creditors may give Kodak the time it needs to find buyers for some of its 1,100 digital patents, the key to its remaining value, and to reshape its business while continuing to pay its 17,000 workers.
"The board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," Chairman and Chief Executive Antonio Perez said in a statement.
"Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core intellectual-property assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company," he added.
At end September, the group had total assets of $5.1 billion and liabilities of $6.75 billion.
Kodak said it and its U.S. subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 business reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Non-U.S. subsidiaries were not covered by the filing and would continue to honor all obligations to their suppliers, it added.
Kodak once dominated its industry and its film was the subject of a popular Paul Simon song, but it failed to embrace more modern technologies quickly enough, such as the digital camera -- ironically, a product it even invented.
Its downfall hit its Rust Belt hometown of Rochester, New York, with employment there falling to about 7,000 from more than 60,000 in Kodak's heyday.
Its market value has sunk to below $150 million from $31 billion 15 years ago.
In recent years, Chief Executive Perez has steered Kodak's focus more toward consumer and commercial printers.
But that failed to restore annual profitability, something Kodak has not seen since 2007, or arrest a cash drain that has made it difficult for Kodak to meet its substantial pension and other benefits obligations to its workers and retirees.
Perez said bankruptcy protection would enable Kodak to continue to work to maximize the value of its technology assets, such as digital-imaging patents it says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet. The company has also built up patented printing technology.
Kodak said it was being advised by investment bank Lazard Ltd, which has been helping Kodak look for a buyer for its digital patents.
Other advisers included business-turnaround specialist FTI Consulting Inc, whose vice chairman, Dominic DiNapoli, would serve as chief restructuring officer for Kodak, supporting existing management.
In the last few years, Kodak has used extensive litigation with rivals such as Apple Inc, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd and Taiwan's HTC Corp over those patents as a means to try to generate revenue. Those patents may now be sold through the bankruptcy process.
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George Eastman, a high school dropout from upstate New York, founded Kodak in 1880, and began to make photographic plates. To get his business going, he splurged on a second-hand engine for $125.
Within eight years, the Kodak name had been trademarked, and the company had introduced the hand-held camera as well as roll-up film, where it became the dominant producer.
Eastman also introduced the "Wage Dividend" in which the company would pay bonuses to employees based on results.
Nearly a century after Kodak's founding, the astronaut Neil Armstrong used a Kodak camera the size of a shoebox to take pictures as he became in 1969 the first man to walk on the moon.
Those pictures arguably had more viewers than the 80 films that have won Best Picture Oscars and were shot on Kodak film.
Six years after Armstrong's walk, and not long after Simon told his mama not to take his Kodachrome away, Kodak invented the digital camera.
The size of a toaster, it was too big for the pockets of amateur photographers, whose pockets now are stuffed with digital offerings from the likes of Canon, Casio and Nikon.
But rather than develop the digital camera, Kodak put it on the back-burner and spent years watching rivals take market share that it would never reclaim.
In 1994, Kodak spun off a chemicals business, Eastman Chemical Co, which proved to be more successful.
Kodak's final downfall in the eyes of investors began in September when it unexpectedly withdrew $160 million from a credit line, raising worries of a cash shortage. It ended September with $862 million of cash.
PENSIONS IN FOCUS
In its bankruptcy, Kodak could try to restructure its debts, or perhaps sell all or some of its assets, including the patent portfolio and various businesses.
It is unclear how Kodak will address its pension obligations, many of which were built up decades ago when U.S. manufacturers offered more generous retirement and medical benefits than they do now. Many retirees hail from Britain where Kodak has been manufacturing since 1891.
The company had promised to inject $800 million over the next decade into its UK pension fund. It now remains unclear how that country's pension regulator might seek to preserve some or all of the company's obligations to British pensioners.
(Reporting by Nick Brown, Caroline Humer and Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Mark Bendeich)
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Failure due to pompous attitude and inability to re-invent itself.
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I remember when all the typewriter companies went under. I can't wait for all the companies that manufacture for the 'war machine' go under, due to human beings 'changing their ways'...
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Just another sign of the decline of America. GM, Chrysler, Kodak, Fannie Mae, AIG, Kmart, Circuit City, Bethlehem Steel. All bankrupt in the last 15 years or so. Kind of sad.
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it's all because of few short sighted idiots who couldn't compete with tech era and brought the company down. Shame!!!
セリン・デオンやマライヤ・カレイとよく並び称されるホイットニー・ヒュウストン。世界を代表する３大歌手の一角の死には悲しいものがある。
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48歳のホイットニー・ヒューストン、ビバリーズヒルズホテルで死す。
Award-winning singer Whitney Houston dies at age 48
By Bob Tourtellotte
Sat Feb 11, 2012 11:04pm EST
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Grammy-winning singer and actress Whitney Houston, one of the most talented performers of her generation who lived a turbulent personal life and admitted drug use, died on Saturday in a Beverly Hills hotel room. She was 48.
A Beverly Hills police officer told reporters they were called to the Beverly Hilton, in Los Angeles, at around 3:20 p.m. PST and that emergency personnel found Houston's body in a fourth-floor room, and she was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m.
"She has been positively identified by friends and family (who) were with her at the hotel, and next of kin have already been notified," Lieutenant Mark Rosen told reporters.
Police said there were no obvious signs of criminal intent at the scene and her death is under investigation.
Houston was in Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards, the music industry's biggest honors program that will take place on Sunday night. She died hours before she was expected to perform at record producer Clive Davis's annual pre-Grammy party on Saturday, which is held at the Beverly Hilton
Houston, inspired by soul singers in her New Jersey family, including mother Cissy Houston and cousins Dionne Warwick and the late Dee Dee Warwick, as well as her godmother Aretha Franklin, became one of the most celebrated female singers of all time, taking multiple Emmy, Grammy and Billboard Music awards.
STELLAR CAREER, PERSONAL TROUBLES
Her popularity soared in the 1980s and 1990s with consecutive No. 1 hits including the smash single "I Will Always Love You," from the soundtrack of the feature film "The Bodyguard," in which she starred.
She also appeared in "Waiting to Exhale (1995) and The Preacher's Wife (1996)."
By the early 1990s, Houston had become the queen of pop music, achieving great critical and commercial acclaim, but her personal life was becoming troubled. In 1992 she married singer Bobby Brown, who had a bad-boy reputation, and during their 14 years together had a tumultuous relationship fueled by drugs.
In 2000, she and Brown were stopped at an airport in Hawaii and security guards discovered marijuana in their luggage.
The pair also starred in reality TV series, "Being Bobby Brown," which painted an often unflattering portrait of the pair.
The last 10 years of Houston's life were dominated by drug use, rumors of relapses and trips to rehab. In a 2002 TV interview, she admitted using marijuana, cocaine, alcohol and prescription drugs.
She launched a comeback tour in 2009 and in April 2010 she called media reports she was using drugs again "ridiculous." In May 2011, Houston enrolled in a drug and alcohol rehab program.
Reactions came pouring in from fans and friends in the music industry.
"I am absolutely heartbroken at the news of Whitney's passing," legendary music producer Quincy Jones said in a statement. "... I always regretted not having had the opportunity to work with her. She was a true original and a talent beyond compare. I will miss her terribly."
Neil Portnow, chief executive of the Recording Academy that gives out the Grammys, called her "one of the world's greatest pop singers of all time who leaves behind a robust musical soundtrack spanning the past three decades."
Pop star Rihanna posted on Twitter "No words, just tears," and rapper Nicki Minaj tweeted "Jesus Christ, not Whitney Houston. Greatest of all time."
(Additional reporting by Mary Slosson; Editing by Philip Barbara)
Florida teen's slaying spotlights phantom gun effect
By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK | Tue Mar 20, 2012 7:08pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - As the investigation continues into last month's fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, psychology researchers can point to one aspect of the tragedy: how easy it is to "see" that someone is holding a gun when he is not.
In the latest research, scientists found that simply holding a gun, as George Zimmerman was when he confronted Martin in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, has an effect.
"The mere act of holding a gun makes it more likely that you will perceive an object as a gun," said James Brockmole, associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame and co-author of an upcoming paper on that phenomenon.
"Does that mean that if the neighborhood watch captain had not been armed he would have perceived the situation differently? It's impossible to say that about any specific situation, but our research shows it is certainly a possibility."
Martin was walking from a convenience store and had put up his hooded sweatshirt when Zimmerman, a 28-year-old white man, saw him. According to 911 calls the police released last week, Zimmerman followed the teen in his SUV.
"This guy looks like he's up to no good or on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about," Zimmerman told the 911 operator. "He's here now just looking at all the houses. . . . He's coming to check me out. He's got something in his hands."
Martin's lawyer said the 17-year-old was on his cellphone with his girlfriend as the incident unfolded, telling her that he was being followed. She encouraged him to run. The case will go before a grand jury beginning April 10.
Recognizing objects is not a simple matter of vision, said Brockmole. Instead, emotions, beliefs, and expectations can all affect the ability to accurately identify objects, numerous lab experiments have found.
Perhaps the most notorious real-world example of that was the 1999 killing Amidou Diallo in New York City: the 23-year-old Guinean immigrant was shot 41 times by police officers who perceived him as brandishing a gun. Standing in a dark doorway, Diallo was in fact showing them his wallet. In that case, said Brockmole, "racial stereotypes and beliefs about criminality may have caused the police to see a gun" that wasn't there.
But something else was at play in the Diallo case: the police were holding guns. That caused Brockmole and a colleague, assistant professor of psychology Jessica Witt of Purdue University, to ask whether "the mere act of wielding firearms have biased the officers to misperceive Diallo's actions," as they put it in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
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Brockmole's team ran five experiments with 220 participants. In each, the volunteers held either a foam ball or a firearm (a Wii gun - a type of gun used in videogames - or a disabled carbon-dioxide-powered BB pistol) while images flashed by on a monitor.
Each image, lasting less than a second, showed a person holding a gun or an innocuous object such as a shoe, soda can, or cell phone. The person in the image was either black or white, bare-headed or wearing a black ski mask. In one variation, the participant did not hold a gun, but one was conspicuously placed in the lab.
The mere presence of a gun nearby did not influence how likely people were to mistake a shoe or other innocent object for a gun. But holding a gun was, the scientists report in the upcoming paper.
"We got a substantial effect," said Witt. "Holding a firearm makes you more likely to see innocuous objects as guns."
That result fit with other studies showing that "people's perception of their ability to act influences their perception of the world," Witt said.
For instance, she has found that when someone holds a long stick, objects seem closer - apparently because people think their ability to reach the object means it is nearby. People with broader shoulders perceive doorways as narrower than smaller people do, strong hitters see a softball as larger than poor hitters do, skilled golf putters perceive the hole as larger than poor duffers do, and out-of-reach objects look closer when people can hit them with a laser pointer.
"The perception system and the motor system evolved together," Witt said. "They share circuitry, so it makes sense that one would affect the other."
Whether that effect - holding a gun making someone more likely to "see" a gun - played any role in Sanford is impossible to say. But the proliferation of right-to-carry and concealed-carry gun laws makes that mistake more likely, say scientists. It might not even be necessary to have the gun in one's hand.
"It's all about intention," Witt said. "If you can feel the weapon on your hip and intend to use it, my prediction is that the perceptual bias would be just as great. Based on our other research, the anticipation of using an object is just as powerful an influence on perception."
Added Brockmole, "They say that when you hold a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That doesn't seem so harmless when you think about what happens when a person holds a gun."
(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Paul Simao)
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Police Reveal George Zimmerman’s Side of the Trayvon Martin Shooting
The neighborhood watch volunteer, who is now widely reviled, says he was attacked by the teenager and was injured in the confrontation with him.
By Madison Gray | March 26, 2012 |
Police have released accounts of the confrontation between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the night the unarmed 17-year-old was shot to death. The details differ profoundly from those put forth by his family’s attorney and place Martin as the aggressor rather than Zimmerman, who has claimed self-defense.
The Orlando Sentinel reported Monday that the story given by Zimmerman to Sanford, Fla., police was that Martin struck him, knocking him to the ground, then slammed his head into the sidewalk repeatedly. Police also say witness accounts back up what Zimmerman told them, which contradict earlier stories of Martin being stalked, then killed by the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer.
According to Zimmerman, he was on his way to the grocery store when he saw Martin walking through the gated community, The Retreat at Twin Lakes. He called police and reported that he saw a suspicious person, a black male, who was acting strangely and thought he might be on drugs. Recordings of the conversation between Zimmerman and the dispatcher verify this, although it had not been initially released.
(VIDEO: TIME’s Exclusive Interview with Trayvon Martin’s Parents)
Zimmerman got out of his vehicle to follow Martin on foot, though a dispatcher told him that was not necessary. After that, police say it is unclear what exactly happened, but Zimmerman said he no longer saw Martin and was returning back to the vehicle when the teen approached him and they exchanged words. Martin, he said, then struck him, knocked him down and began banging his head on the ground.
At some point, Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest at close range.
Zimmerman’s attorney, Craig Sooner, told ABC News that Zimmerman had a broken nose and an injury to the back of his head. Witnesses, according to the Sentinel, say they saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, punching him and heard him crying for help. Others, who live near where the shooting took place and placed 911 calls, have said it was Martin who cried for help, and say Zimmerman was straddling him, hands pressed against his back.
(PHOTOS: Trayvon Martin’s Death Sparks Outrage, Mourning)
Phone records obtained by Martin’s family lawyer Benjamin Crump suggest the teen was on his cell phone with his girlfriend when he told her he was being followed by Zimmerman. He told her he would walk faster, but not run. Then the phone went dead, according to Crump.
Police say when they arrived, they found Zimmerman with the injuries. He refused medical treatment, but sought it the next day.
The case continues to bring a nationwide outcry, with many demanding that Zimmerman be arrested and insisting that Sanford police were negligent in their duties. Chief Bill Lee, who has temporarily stepped down from his position, has said his department did not have evidence that the shooting was not in self defense.
Special Prosecutor Angela Corey is determining whether to arrest Zimmerman, drop the case or send it to a grand jury which is set to convene on April 10.
韓国系による銃を使った学校での他殺事件は知る限りにおいて２つ目。２００７年４月１６日、Seung-Hui Choが教室や廊下にいるバージニアテック（工科大学）の３２名の教員を含む多数の学生を無差別射殺し２５名に怪我を負わせた事件。アメリカの歴史上記録を塗り替えるほどの犠牲者の多さで驚愕させた。韓国系アメリカ人がアジア系を代表してテレビ・映画によく出てくる。ロスのコリアンタウンが膨らんでいることや、リトル東京まで韓国系が進出していることから、それだけ移民が多いということなのだろうか。
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Oakland college shooting: Troubling portrait of suspect emerges
April 3, 2012 | 4:53 pm
A troubled portrait of the man who police say gunned down seven students at a small Oakland college is emerging a day after one of California’s most deadly rampages.
One L. Goh, 43, moved to Oakland from Virginia in recent years after accruing a number of small infractions and misdemeanors on the East Coast. Once in Oakland, Goh spent about a year working with his father, Young Ko, at a Korean Market in Daly City. Ko had been living nearby in an Oakland-area Christian senior housing complex that accommodates about equal parts Korean, Chinese and other residents.
Acquaintances there said Goh’s father was a humble man who worked hard as a stock boy at a Korean Market in Daly City. They said Ko rarely received visits from his children, including Goh.
"I never saw him with a friend, he was mostly alone," said Park, a 70-year-old Korean resident who asked that only his last name be used.
Goh butted heads with co-workers at the market and left barely a year into the job, a worker at the store's meat counter told The Times. Goh eventually took another job delivering rice around the Bay Area, but the worker said that job also didn't last long, and soon Goh was unemployed.
When Goh’s father, now in his 70s, saw an ad for the nursing program at Oikos University, he suggested that his son enroll.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Goh brought a string of debts with him to the Bay Area and had even been evicted from one apartment complex while in Virginia. Ko paid his son's tuition through his market job, the co-worker said.
But Goh was expelled from Oikos, school officials say. The Associated Press reports that the nursing student had been teased by peers about his English skills during his tenure at the school, and police say his dismissal left Goh seeking revenge on the university and one specific female administrator.
The AP reported that Goh’s mother and brother both died in 2011, and he was still reeling from the loss when he was expelled from the university.
Ko was at his workplace when he was notified of the shooting at Oikos and abruptly left, the co-worker said. The worker declined to give his name.
Goh had taken a woman hostage at the school, then moved into a classroom and lined students against the wall, picking off seven women one by one.
“He has not shown any signs of remorse,” Oakland police spokeswoman Johanna Watson told The Times Tuesday morning.
Goh would fire more shots outside the classroom, and use his semiautomatic handgun to kill a man to commandeer his car, police said. At one point, Goh drove to an Oakland estuary that feeds into the San Leandro Bay and dumped the weapon, authorities say.
About two hours after the shooting, police say Goh arrived at a Safeway store in nearby Alameda and called his father. Ko then called police.
Goh remains in police custody, and the case is expected to be turned over to the district attorney’s office on Wednesday.
The attack will go down as among California's worst shooting rampages. Last year, a gunman opened fire at a Seal Beach hair salon, killing nine people. In 1984, James Huberty killed 21 people at a McDonald's in San Ysidro. In 1976, a former Marine opened fire at the Cal State Fullerton library, killing seven people.
--Victoria Kim in Oakland and Matt Stevens in Los Angeles
Police: Accused Oakland gunman targeted administrator, classmates
By Laird Harrison
OAKLAND, California | Tue Apr 3, 2012 7:55pm EDT
OAKLAND, California (Reuters) - A former student accused of killing seven people and wounding three others in a shooting rampage at a small Christian college in Oakland was gunning for a school administrator and classmates who he felt had treated him unfairly, police said on Tuesday.
Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said that 43-year-old One Goh, expelled from Oikos University for "anger management" issues, has been cooperative since being taken into custody after Monday's shootings but "not particularly remorseful."
"We know that he came here with the intent of locating an administrator and she was not here," Jordan said at a news conference. "He then went through the entire building systematically and randomly shooting victims."
Oikos serves about 100 students in a single building and has links to the Korean-American Christian community. Goh is Korean-American. Prosecutors were expected to file charges against him on Wednesday.
The attack at Oikos was the deadliest shooting rampage at a U.S. college since a student at Virginia Tech University gunned down 32 people in April 2007.
Jordan said the dead in Oakland included six women and a man, ranging in age from 21 to 40, who came from Korea, Nigeria, Nepal and the Philippines. Six were students and one was a secretary.
Police searched on Tuesday for the gun in the shootings, using boats and a robot to plumb an estuary leading into nearby San Leandro Bay. Jordan said ballistics evidence showed the weapon was a semi-automatic pistol.
The three wounded victims were released from an Oakland hospital by mid-morning on Tuesday.
'VERY CHAOTIC'
Jordan said Goh had been expelled from the school two months ago for "behavioral problems and anger management" issues, but he was not aware of any particular incident that led to his removal.
"We've learned that the suspect was upset with the administration at the school," Jordan told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview.
"He was also upset that students ... in the past when he attended the school, mistreated him, disrespected him and things of that nature," he told the program. "We've learned this was a very chaotic, calculated and determined gentleman that came there with specific intent to kill people."
Witnesses said Goh returned to the college on Monday morning, entered a reception area and opened fire. He then walked into one of two classes in session, telling former classmates to line up and that he was going to kill them.
Goh surrendered at a Safeway grocery store several miles away.
The rampage appeared to follow a period of tumult for Goh.
A U.S. Army spokesman said that Goh's brother, Staff Sergeant Su Wan Ko, was killed in a car crash in Virginia in March 2011. Local news accounts at the time said he died after smashing into a boulder that had fallen onto the highway.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Goh's mother died about a year ago. Adding to his troubles, Goh had been involved in a dispute with the owners of an apartment in Virginia who had evicted him and claimed he owed back rent, court records showed.
Oikos, which offers programs in theology, nursing, music and Asian medicine, describes itself on its website as having been started to provide the "highest standard education with Christian value and inspiration."
(Writing by Dan Whitcomb and Dan Burns; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb, Deborah Zabarenko, Malathi Nayak and Mary Slosson; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Will Dunham)
Lottery winner on welfare: Michigan woman now faces fraud charges
Amanda Clayton holds her $1-million lottery check. Authorities say that despite the windfall, she continued collecting public assistance. (Associated Press / April 17, 2012)
By Rene Lynch
April 17, 2012, 2:50 p.m. LATimes
Do you remember the case of Amanda Clayton? She's the Michigan woman who made headlines last month when it was revealed that she'd won $1 million in the state lottery -- and kept collecting welfare.
Well, that alleged double-dipping has cost her: Clayton was arrested Monday on fraud charges and spent the night in the slammer before being arraigned Tuesday morning. She pleaded not guilty to charges that she improperly collected more than $5,475 in food stamps and public medical benefits over an eight-month period, according to the Associated Press.
Michigan taxpayers were particularly outraged because of Clayton's seeming sense of entitlement. Detroit-area TV station Local 4 -- which broke the story -- caught up with Clayton as she was packing up her belongings from one home to move to another home. (She'd bought the new abode -- along with a new car -- using cash from her lottery winnings.)
Clayton explained to the reporter that she deserved the public assistance. After all, she was a single mom without a job: "I feel that it's OK because, I mean, I have no income, and I have bills to pay. I have two houses."
Famous last words.
Public outrage led to the welfare-fraud investigation that led to Clayton's arrest. That outrage also fueled the passage of a bill that triggers an alert to the state's Department of Human Services, which oversees public assistance, whenever a state resident wins more than $1,000 in the state lottery.
Clayton won $1 million on the state's "Make Me Rich!" television show. She chose to take a lump sum upfront, which amounted to $735,000 before taxes.
Clayton's defense attorney, Stanley Wise, told Local 4 that he planned to fight the charges.
最近のアメリカの若者の体たらくな仕事振りをみて心配する記事。
Too Busy for A Summer Job? Why America’s Youth Lacks Basic Work Skills
Many young adults have no clue how to function at the bottom of a hierarchy.
By Erika Christakis | May 1, 2012 |
Do today’s kids make terrible entry-level workers? That’s a question much on employers’ minds as graduation season kicks off and young adults begin their first full-time jobs. We’ve all heard the stories: assistants who won’t “assist,” new workers who can’t set an alarm, employees who can’t grasp institutional hierarchies.
Bosses who toiled in the pre-Self Esteem Era salt mines have little patience for these upstarts. A popular advice columnist had some choice words last week for a young employee who dismissively waved her sandwich at a superior requesting back-up during a critical meeting; the young woman explained that she was on her lunch break and was merely “setting boundaries” with a “disrespectful colleague who sorely needs them.” Moreover, she noted, being “errand girl” wasn’t in her job description.
It’s easy to laugh off these anecdotes, but there are some complex reasons for the lack of familiarity with work norms. For one thing, many twenty-something adults have never held a menial summer job, once considered training wheels for adult life in the American middle class.
It was once common to see teenagers mowing lawns, waiting tables, digging ditches, and bagging groceries for modest wages in the long summer months. Summer employment was a social equalizer, allowing both affluent and financially strapped teenagers to gain a foothold on adulthood, learning the virtues of hard work, respect and teamwork in a relatively low-stakes atmosphere. But youth employment has declined precipitously over the years and young people are losing a chance to develop these important life skills in the process.
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In 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available, less than half of the nation’s youth (16–24) were employed during the month of July, traditionally the peak of summer employment, the lowest percentage since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1948 and almost 20 percentage points lower than the peak in 1989. There’s little indication of that number improving. Teenagers and twentysomethings are the least skilled and most expendable members of the work force, so it’s not surprising that they would be edged out in a recession by more reliable full-time workers such as senior citizens, immigrants, and other adults who need those jobs.
But other long-term factors are at play. Life is more competitive than ever before, and kids—or perhaps their parents—worry about wasting time on jobs that won’t yield career dividends. On Harvard’s campus, where I work, students feel crushing pressure to build their resumes the instant they arrive, eschewing unskilled summer jobs for unpaid internships with non-profit organizations, political campaigns and research labs. Others spend the summer studying foreign languages or preparing for grueling graduate admissions exams.
The same pattern is found at the secondary school level, where teen employment has been on a downward trend since 2000. Tougher graduation standards have created a three-fold increase in summer school attendance over the last 20 years. And students feel the need to pad their college applications with unique life experiences as the admissions process has grown more selective. High schools also now routinely require public service — surely a good thing — that can further limit the available hours to work for pay.
Many of these social changes are a sign of a healthy, and upwardly mobile, society. But there’s a problem when more than 50% of the nation’s young workforce has never held a basic, paying job. We may be postponing their entry into adulthood. One paradox of contemporary life is that the lengthening of adolescence has not better prepared young people for what comes next. Despite unprecedented technological and cultural sophistication, this generation’s 20-year-olds lack some of the ‘soft’ skills that are necessary to move up the professional ladder: perseverance, humility, flexibility and commitment.
In the end, though, it’s their elders who are responsible, and we shouldn’t demonize young people for our own failings. Most graduates embarking on their first job are eager to perform well and desperately need the income. It’s grown-ups, not teenagers, who have honed the values, expectations and opportunities from which our nation’s youth develop their work habits. If we want a more respectful and industrious workforce, we need to do a better job creating one.
Erika Christakis, M.P.H., M.Ed., is a Harvard College administrator who blogs at ErikaChristakis.com. The views expressed are solely her own.
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アメリカの教師と生徒の関係是正
Teachers, no more friending your students in New York City
Pic=Nkomo Morris, a teacher at Brooklyn's Art and Media High School, works on her classroom computer last month in New York. Morris, who teaches English and journalism, said she has about 50 current and former students as Facebook friends. (Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press / May 1, 2012)
New York City teachers will have to resist hitting the "Add Friend" button on their students' Facebook pages.
Thanks to a new list of guidelines released by the Education Department on Tuesday, public school teachers may no longer contact students through personal pages on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the New York Times.
The newspaper said that while the new employee guidelines don't ban teachers from using social media, they should only communicate to their students through pages set up for classroom use or via professional accounts.
Professional pages are those devoted to "classroom business like homework and study guides," the New York Times said. And teachers must get a supervisor's permission before setting up such pages; parents will also have to sigh a consent form before their children can participate.
The measures were put in place in light of increasing concerns about teacher-student conduct. Often, inappropriate relationships involve or begin on social media sites, a department investigator told the paper.
What do you think? Are the city's measures overboard or necessary?
アメリカの多元的な社会が求めるリーダー格とは。
Column: Prizes for diversity give hope for future
By Yolanda Young
As a nation, we are becoming increasingly diverse, but racial tensions seem to be on the rise, particularly among young people.
Hopes for a post-racial era are quickly forgotten when you read about two black teenagers accused of setting a 13-year-old white boy on fire in Kansas City, Mo. Or about white students at Gloucester (Mass.) High School being investigated for racist tweets directed at a black Washington Capitals hockey player, Joel Ward.
Such vile acts make me wonder whether today's youth are retreating into xenophobia. So I was greatly relieved to read about this year's winners and honorees of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations, which recognizes high school students who work in their schools and communities to advance inclusiveness. Their efforts give us hope that these future leaders in diversity will negate the bad acts of a few.
Take Yousif Hanna, who came to the U.S. from Iraq. After entering Boston College High School in 2009, Hanna managed, with a limited grasp of English, to earn top grades and forge bonds with three other diverse students: Frankie Davis, who is Dominican and Irish Italian; Haitian immigrant Varnel Antoine; and Chinese-American Kevin Dong. Princeton credited them with breaking stereotypes and forging friendships that transcend race, and ethnicity.
Michael Wattendorf was elected the first white president of the Black Student Union at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia. He won the award for creating a mentorship program to encourage an interest in math and science among black elementary and middle school students.
The most hopeful signs of these awards are that winners often continue to promote the cause of diversity. In 2004, Zainep Mahmoud was among the first-prize winners. As a high school sophomore, she wrote a play, Unforgettable, about the tragic consequences of harassment and assaults against those of Arab descent in the wake of Sept. 11. Mahmoud continued her diversity efforts as a leader of Dartmouth's Afro-American Society, while also mentoring students. She later was hired by Google, in part for her leadership skills, and is now attending Wharton Business School, where she is an officer of the African American MBA Association.
Although racial differences will probably always be with us, the Princeton Prizes give us hope for the future and the powers of inclusiveness.
Yolanda Young is the founder of www.onbeingablacklawyer.com.
アメリカの民間の科学力・技術力
*****
Commercial rocket will fly to the space station
May 17, 3:54 PM EDT
By MARCIA DUNN AP Aerospace Writer
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- For the first time, a private company will launch a rocket to the International Space Station, sending it on a grocery run this weekend that could be the shape of things to come for America's space program.
If this unmanned flight and others like it succeed, commercial spacecraft could be ferrying astronauts to the orbiting outpost within five years.
It's a transition that has been in the works since the middle of the last decade, when President George W. Bush decided to retire the space shuttle and devote more of NASA's energies to venturing deeper into space.
Saturday's flight by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is "a thoroughly exciting moment in the history of spaceflight, but is just the beginning of a new way of doing business for NASA," said President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren.
By handing off space station launches to private business, "NASA is freeing itself up to focus on exploring beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years."
California-based Space Exploration, or SpaceX, is the first of several companies hoping to take over the space station delivery business for the U.S. The company's billionaire mastermind, Elon Musk, puts the odds of success in his favor while acknowledging the chance for mishaps.
NASA likewise cautions: This is only a test.
"We need to be careful not to assume that the success or failure of commercial spaceflight is going to hang in the balance of this single flight," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager. "Demo flights don't always go as planned."
Once it nears the space station after a two-day flight, the SpaceX capsule, called Dragon, will spend a day of practice maneuvers before NASA signals it to move in for a linkup. Then its cargo - a half-ton of food and other pantry items, all nonessential, in case the flight goes awry - will be unloaded.
Up to now, flights to the space station have always been a government-only affair.
Until their retirement last summer, shuttles carried most of the gear and many of the astronauts to the orbiting outpost. Since then, American astronauts have had to rely on Russian capsules for rides. European, Japanese and Russian supply ships have been delivering cargo.
It will be at least four to five years before SpaceX or any other private operator is capable of flying astronauts. That gap infuriates many. Some members of Congress want to cut government funding to the private space venture and reduce the number of rival companies to save money and speed things up.
The shift to private enterprise, while revolutionary in space, has a long history in the U.S. The Internet, for example, evolved from government work. Space station astronaut Donald Pettit points to the settling of the American West: The government ran the forts, and private enterprise built the railroads.
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In this instance, NASA employees are still working closely with the commercial contenders, giving advice and attending company meetings.
"I see this whole story repeating itself again and again as we move from low-Earth orbit," Pettit said. "And it will probably repeat itself when we go to the moon and elsewhere."
No one is rooting more for SpaceX than NASA. The space agency has poured $381 million into the SpaceX effort, while the company has spent $1 billion over its 10-year lifetime, said Musk, the high-tech pioneer who co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric car company.
NASA also gave $266 million to a second company it hired to make supply runs. Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. hopes to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule from Wallops Island, Va., by year's end.
"This is the start of a real new era," said Dutch spaceman Andre Kuipers, who will help Pettit snare the Dragon and pull it to the space station with a robotic arm.
Pettit agreed the upcoming Dragon flight is a "big deal," but added: "I hope this becomes so routine that people won't even pay attention to it anymore."
SpaceX will have only a split second, at 4:55 a.m. Saturday, to shoot its Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule skyward. (All spacecraft bound for the space station these days have instantaneous launch windows in order to sync up efficiently with the orbiting outpost.)
SpaceX already has achieved what no other commercial entity has done: It launched a spacecraft into orbit and brought it back intact in a 2010 test flight that ended with the capsule splashing down in the Pacific.
But getting to the space station is twice as hard, said Musk, who is not only CEO but chief designer. A Dragon capsule has never before attempted a rendezvous and docking in orbit - an exquisitely delicate operation, with the risk of a collision that could prove ruinous for the space station, which has six men on board.
If something goes wrong, "we'll fix the problem and be back at it," Musk said. Two more SpaceX delivery trips are planned for this year.
The bell-shaped Dragon capsule is 19 feet tall and 12 feet across. What sets it apart from other capsules is that it can bring back space station experiments and old equipment, as the shuttles did. None of the Russian, European and Japanese supply ships do that - they burn up when they return to Earth. The Russian Soyuz vehicles that ferry astronauts have little room to spare.
The Dragon will be cut loose from the space station about two weeks after arriving and aim for a Pacific splashdown off the California coast.
Other U.S. companies vying for a shot at launching space station astronauts - like Sierra Nevada Corp., which is designing the mini-shuttle Dream Chaser - are cheering on SpaceX since it is the first one out of NASA's post-shuttle, commercial gate.
Former space shuttle commander Steven Lindsey, director of flight operations for Sierra Nevada in Colorado, said: "It's a new way of doing business, and there's a lot of debate back and forth on whether it's going to be successful - or whether it can be successful."
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止まっても倒れない二輪車。３輪・４輪車の感覚で運転ができる二輪車の将来。
****
Lit Motors' C-1: A 2-wheel car? Or untippable motorcycle?
The vehicle developed by Lit Motors uses gyroscopes to stay balanced in a straight line and in turns.
By Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times
May 26, 2012
Lit Motors calls it the C-1, but the San Francisco start-up's untippable motorcycle seems nothing short of magic. It uses gyroscopes to stay balanced in a straight line and in turns in which drivers can, in theory, roll down their windows and drag their knuckles on the ground.
Is it a motorcycle? A car? Neither. It's an entirely new form of personal transportation, presuming it gets off the ground.
The all-electric vehicle is fully enclosed and uses a steering wheel and floor pedals like a car. But it weighs just 800 pounds and balances on two wheels even when stopped, making it more efficient than hauling around a 2-ton four-wheeler and safer than an accident-prone bike.
"Most people don't drive motorcycles because they're dangerous," said Lit Motors founder and C-1 creator Daniel Kim, 32. "We're bringing safety to motorcycles with car-like controls that everyone's familiar with," Kim said of his self-stabilizing two wheeler, which, if it goes into production in early 2014 as planned, will be made with a steel unibody and glass windows to protect drivers from the weather and objects that might crash into them, leaving enough room behind the driver's seat to carry a passenger, groceries or suitcase.
Two years away from production, there are currently two versions of the C-1: a sleek, Swedish-influenced model to demonstrate its curb appeal, and a rudimentary, drivable mock-up that can travel 10 miles per hour and withstand a swift kick to its side and remain standing.
The C-1, or Concept 1, uses the same type of electronically controlled gyroscopes as the Hubble Space Telescope. Two counter-rotating gyroscopes are mounted into the floor of the vehicle, working together to maintain balance in a turn, a straight line or at rest.
The C-1 is a more user-friendly version of the X-Prize-winning E-tracer, a $100,000 electric cabin motorcycle controlled with handlebars, a throttle and outriggers to keep it upright at slow speeds and when stopped.
The C-1 isn't the first vehicle to use gyroscopes. Mechanically controlled gyro cars have been around for almost a century. While the Segway personal transporter is the most modern and mainstream example of gyroscopic technology working to balance an otherwise teetering two wheeler, what's different about the C-1 is the configuration of the wheels and the number, size and speed of the gyros, which are as big as dinner plates piled with pancakes, their centers spinning up to 12,000 revolutions per minute.
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The faster the gyros spin, the more force they exert on the vehicle to keep it balanced. In production form, the composite-reinforced side panels should be able to withstand a typical side impact from significantly larger SUVs, Kim said. Its tires, which have a wider contact patch than most traditional motorcycles, allow for better traction when driving and should skid across the pavement in case of impact.
In production form, each wheel hub will be outfitted with a motor, making the C-1 a two-wheel, rather than rear-drive vehicle — aiding with traction and enabling the C-1 to be driven in the snow.
Because the C-1 is computer controlled, it can even be programmed to do tricks, such as stoppies, wheelies and slide outs, on command.
Kim was inspired to develop the motorcycle-car hybrid after he was almost killed by a Land Rover, he said.
"I was building two biodiesel SUVs and one of them almost fell on me, so I started to think about why do we need all this car? The inefficiencies became very apparent, so I decided to cut the car in half and build the perfect commuter," said Kim, who attended Reed College, UC Berkeley and the Rhode Island Institute of Design studying physics, biology, architecture, industrial design and engineering — all of which are evidenced in the C-1.
Kim incorporated Lit Motors in 2010 and now has nine employees. He counts Zipcar founder Robin Chase, Aptera Motors co-founder Steve Fambro and Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins among the company's advisors. Of the $700,000 he has so far raised in venture capital, $200,000 went into building the drivable prototype, which, with a current top speed of a lap dog and only a single working gyro, made for an exceedingly slow test drive that was exciting mostly for the possibility it presents.
The personal transportation industry is now focused on emissions, but as the global population increases and shifts to urban areas, the discussion is likely to include options like the C-1 that can help reduce traffic congestion and burdens on roadway infrastructure.
Like its name, which is likely to evolve along with the machine, the C-1 is so early in its development that the final drivetrain hasn't yet been determined. Kim is targeting a top speed of 120 miles per hour and 220 miles per charge using an 8-kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack. The $24,000 starting price is comparable to a high-endHarley-Davidsonor Ducati.
"People work. People commute. And everyone should be able to drive a motorcycle safely and not have to worry about the constraints of a car and do it on a sustainable platform," Kim said. "That should be the paradigm for products today."
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The 20 Most Influential Americans of All Time
The trailblazers, visionaries and cultural ambassadors who defined a nation. (Listed chronologically)
1. George Washington
Cultivator of a Nation: 1732-99
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012
The legend of the man is sheltered these days behind high fences of respect. Were the real Washington on hand today, that might not be the case, and therein may lie a lesson. By our modern measures, George Washington did not read the right books: he relished how-to-do-it texts, with their new ideas on the use of manure, turning soil and animal husbandry. He did not delve very far into art, philosophy or science. Nor did he speak foreign languages (Thomas Jefferson spoke or read five). Washington never traveled to Europe, while Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Jefferson all spent years there. Aloof and remote, meticulous in his wardrobe, he was not one of the boys, and he was never an accomplished public speaker.
Washington’s military achievements are admired for their perseverance rather than their brilliance. The Battle of Trenton might have been as important a conflict as this nation ever won. His victory brought the Revolution back to life: the colonies dared hope again for independence, France began to look with more favor on the American struggle, and Britain began to lose heart. But the battle itself was technically a shambles.
The first President sometimes looked on his 22 years of public service as a kind of prison sentence that took him away from his Virginia estate — Washington accumulated nearly 100,000 acres of land in his last years and was judged one of the wealthiest men in the nation. His favorite recreation was fox hunting, and he was a slaveholder, though, unlike Jefferson, he set his more than 125 slaves free in his will.
George Washington was sensible and wise. He was not the most informed or imaginative of men. But he understood himself and this nation-to-be. His heart and mind were shaped by his family, his land, his community and the small events that touched him every day. He had the tolerance of a landsman, the faith that comes with witnessing the changing seasons year in and year out. Optimism, perseverance, patience and an eager view of the distant horizon have always been a gift of the earth to those who stayed close to it.
This entry is excerpted from the new TIME book The 100 Most Influential People of All Time, which profiles spiritual icons, leaders, explorers, visionaries and cultural titans throughout human history. Available wherever books are sold and at time.com/100peoplebook
２．Thomas Jefferson
American Sphinx: 1743-1826
By Lance Morrow | July 24, 2012
Of all the founding fathers, he has fared the worst at the hands of revisionists. If Thomas Jefferson has managed to keep his place on Mount Rushmore, he has been vilified almost everywhere else in recent years as a slave-owning hypocrite and racist; a political extremist; an apologist for the vicious French Revolution; and, in general, somewhat less than the genius remembered in our folklore.
The onslaught is unfair. But even ardent Jeffersonians admit that the man was an insoluble puzzle. The contradictions in his character and his ideas could be breathtaking. That the author of the Declaration of Independence not only owned and worked slaves at Monticello but kept one of them, Sally Hemings, as a mistress — fathering children with her but never freeing her or them — was merely the most dramatic of his inconsistencies. Yet he was arguably the most accomplished man who ever occupied the White House: naturalist, lawyer, musician, architect, geographer, inventor, scientist, agriculturalist, philologist.
A dozen powerful strands of the Enlightenment converged in him: a certain sky-blue clarity, an aggressive awareness of the world, a fascination with science, a mechanical vision of the universe and an obsession with mathematical precision. Many of the contradictions in his character arose from the discrepancies between such intellectual machinery and the passionate, organic disorders of life.
Jefferson helped shape America, serving in the Continental Congress, as a diplomat, as Secretary of State, as the President who made the Louisiana Purchase, as the founder of the University of Virginia. Yet his finest hour came when he was young, only 33. In the Declaration, he formulated the founding aspiration of America and what remains its best self: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … “
３．Sacagawea, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Explorers: Sacagawea, 1788-1812 Lewis, 1774-1809 Clark, 1770-1838
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 |
When President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and a company of men up the Missouri River and into the terra incognita of the lands newly acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, the young United States already had a Constitution, but it lacked an epic vision. It had a government but no real identity. Lewis, Clark and their Corps of Discovery helped invent one — with the essential assistance of a young Indian woman, Sacagawea.
The Native American, pregnant at 16, was the wife of Toussaint Charbonneau, a fur trapper serving the expedition as a guide; she was valued for her knowledge of the Shoshone language. Clark helped her give birth inside a wintry fort, and she repaid him a thousand times over by arranging with her Indian kinsmen for the expedition’s safe passage over the Rockies. As Clark noted in his diary, “The sight of this Indian woman … confirmed those people of our friendly intentions.”
Lewis and Clark kept perhaps the most complete journals in the history of human exploration (some of which survived only because Sacagawea jumped into a stream to retrieve them when a canoe capsized). We can look over their shoulders as they and their party contend with hunger, disease, blizzards, broiling sun, boiling rapids, furious grizzly bears and plagues of “musquetors.” When their party returned to St. Louis after 26 months on the road, the blank spaces on the American map had been filled in — and the nation’s continental destiny beckoned.
４．Abraham Lincoln
Voice of Freedom: 1809-65
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 |
His story seems hewn as much from legend and folklore as from history: a rawboned youth from the backwoods of the American frontier, he rose to guide his nation through a bloody Civil War that ended its reliance on human slavery, kept its Union intact and restored its founding vision — only to die at the hand of an assassin as the war ended.
His success story embodies the American Dream: entirely self-taught, he worked his father’s farm; rode flatboats down the Mississippi River; served briefly in the Black Hawk Indian War; then moved to Springfield, Ill., where he studied law, married well and began a long career as a regional lawyer, riding a judicial circuit on horseback. Elected to Congress in 1846, he opposed a trumped-up U.S. war with Mexico and lost favor with his constituents, then retired from politics until the nation’s rising tensions over slavery lured him back into public life in the mid-1850s.
Lincoln became the most articulate voice against human bondage in the nation, earning wide respect in a failed Senate campaign in 1858, then using his new fame to win the nomination of the antislavery Republican Party in 1860. His election brought the secession of 11 states in the South, but he stood firm, rallying the unprepared North to a final battle over the future of the Union. Cursed with a parade of weak generals (at right, he meets with General George McClellan in 1862), he taught himself military strategy and gradually found generals who could fight.
A masterly politician, Lincoln held the Union cause together through a long and bloody conflict. In the wake of the war’s pivotal battle, he rearticulated the nation’s values in his powerful Gettysburg Address. After winning a second term, he pledged the Union would welcome the seceded states back “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” He was slain just after the Confederacy urrendered, but his mighty task was done.
５．Sitting Bull
Resistance Fighter: c. 1831-90
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
The Lakota Sioux chief Sitting Bull is the most famous of a long line of Native Americans who fought bravely to withstand the tide of white European settlers advancing across the continental U.S. His predecessors include Tecumseh, Black Hawk and Osceola; his contemporary was the Apache chieftain Geronimo. But it was Sitting Bull who won the Indians’ most prominent victory against the U.S. Army, when several thousand Native American warriors surrounded and defeated the forces commanded by the vainglorious General George A. Custer along the Little Bighorn River on June 25-26, 1876, killing 268 American soldiers — only days before the U.S. celebrated the centennial of the Declaration of Independence.
Born around 1831 in the Dakota Territory, Sitting Bull fought in many of the long-running battles between white settlers and Indians, from the early 1860s through the early 1870s. Still the white wave rolled on, as railroads sought to build tracks across Indian lands and a gold rush in Dakota brought thousands of prospectors into the region.
Sitting Bull’s victory over Custer prompted retaliation by Washington, and the chief and his followers fled to Canada, where they lived in dire poverty; in 1881, the Indians accepted a government offer to return to the U.S., where Sitting Bull served two years in jail before he was released. By now he had achieved notoriety for his 1876 triumph, and he lived as a celebrity, meeting President Grover Cleveland and appearing briefly in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. But when the last spasm of Indian resistance emerged in the late 1880s — the delusional Ghost Dance movement — whites again feared Sitting Bull’s influence. Federal officials ordered the chief’s arrest, and he was killed in the melee that ensued. A final indignity remained: Sitting Bull’s cabin was torn down and rebuilt as an attraction at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.
６．Alexander G. Bell
Long-Distance Operator: 1847-1922
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
March 1876: in the attic of a Boston boarding house, two young scientists were working at top speed. One was a Scottish-born teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell; the other was an American, Thomas A. Watson. Following Bell’s instructions Watson had constructed the first crude telephone, but the results were disappointing. Sounds came over the wire, but no intelligible words.
The men were constructing a new transmitter, in which a diaphragm of thin cow’s membrane was attached to a wire carrying an electric current, which in turn was dipped in diluted sulfuric acid. To test the device, they installed a line connecting the front and back rooms. Watson went to the front room, took up his post at the receiver. In his excitement, Bell in the back room drenched his clothes with acid spilled from a battery. He called into the transmitter, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” Trembling with jubilation, Watson rushed to the back room crying, “I heard you! I heard you!” At that point Bell forgot all about his ruined clothing.
That scene is one of science’s great eureka moments. Yet its very fame, and the impact and ubiquity of the telephone, has overshadowed the breadth and depth of the career of Bell, one of science’s great modern Renaissance men. Only 29 when he uttered his famous plea to Watson, Bell went on to explore a host of new frontiers and perfect a dazzling array of new devices, including the first metal detector and an improved phonograph, the graphophone. (Both Bell’s mother and his wife were deaf, and he was a lifelong student of hearing and acoustics.)
Bell was a pioneer of magnetic recording, hydrofoil watercraft and airplane design. He helped fund the start-up of Science magazine and helped found the National Geographic Society, becoming its second president. He even explored genetics at his estate in Nova Scotia, working for 30 years to breed female sheep with more nipples than the standard two, thus increasing their fecundity. He was, after all, well versed in the power of fecundity.
７．Thomas Edison
Patenting Progress: 1847-1931
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
Much of the world we live in today is a legacy of Thomas Alva Edison and of his devotion to science and innovation. He not only invented the first commercial electric light bulb but also established the first investor-owned electric utility, in 1882, on Pearl Street in New York City. His phonograph, invented in 1877, launched a global recorded-music industry that is worth nearly $150 billion today. But more than a simple series of inventions, Edison’s most lasting contribution might be the system of industrial innovation he helped pioneer.
Edison’s true genius lay in his ability to bring mass brainpower to the process of invention. The laboratory and workshop he established in Menlo Park, N.J., in 1876 — his “invention factory” — put him at the center of a critical mass of assistants with backgrounds in multiple areas of science, engineering and skilled labor. It was essentially America’s first industrial R&D facility, the forerunner of a modern-day geeks-in-a-garage skunkworks.
Edison patented 1,093 mechanisms and processes, including a stock ticker, a mimeograph, a microphone, a mechanical vote recorder and a battery for an electric car. He came up with the crucial devices that gave birth to three enduring industries: electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures. Yet he was an odd sort of hero: a millionaire who often slept in a closet at the lab with his clothes on; a picturesque swearer who hired assistants whom George Bernard Shaw called “sensitive, cheerful and profane; liars, braggarts and hustlers”; a would-be tycoon so bullheaded that he could give little credit to the ideas of others; a businessman so inept that he lost control of the hugely profitable companies he founded. “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent,” he said. “Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” By his own yardstick, he was wildly successful.
８．Henry Ford
Prime Mover: 1863-1947
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
He didn’t invent the auto-mobile, but Henry Ford pretty much invented the modern world, transforming transportation and bringing manufacturing and society along for the ride. As Lee Iacocca, who began his auto career at Ford in the 1940s, wrote in Time, “The boss was a genius. He was an eccentric. He was no prince in his social attitudes and his politics. But Henry Ford’s impact in history is almost unbelievable.” In 1905, when Ford’s backers insisted that the best way to increase profits was to build a car for the rich, he argued that the workers who built the cars ought to be able to afford one themselves.
Ford’s Model T, released in 1908, was elegantly simple — and affordable. “Ford instituted industrial mass production,” Iacocca noted, “but what really mattered to him was mass consumption. He figured that if he paid his factory workers a real living wage and produced more cars in less time for less money, everyone would buy them … it was a virtuous circle, and he was the ringmaster.” His vision helped create a middle class in the U.S., one marked by urbanization, rising wages and free time for workers to spend their pay.
Ford helped develop an infrastructure of dealer-franchisers, gas stations and better roads to support his cars. His great strength was the manufacturing process, not invention. The company’s assembly line in Highland Park, Mich., humming along in 1914 to churn out a new car every 93 minutes, threw America’s Industrial Revolution into overdrive. The same year, Ford doubled his workers’ wages, helping more of them buy more cars. His views of race and history are a blot on his legacy — and he let General Motors lap Ford Motor with stronger marketing — but his impact on our world is undeniable.
９．Wright Brothers
Masters of Gravity: Wilbur, 1867-1912 Orville, 1871-1948
By Bill Gates | July 24, 2012 | +
Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co., the bicycle shop they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were many bicycle shops in their America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels.
The brothers were long fascinated by the idea of flight. The force of their obsession led them to develop, single-handedly, the technologies they needed to pursue their dream. When standard aeronautical data proved unreliable, they built their own wind tunnel to learn how to lift a flying machine into the sky (in the photo on this page, they are test-flying a glider). They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely up and down on a cushion of air. They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft and fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back to control its tendency to yaw from side to side. They devised a pulley system that warped the shape of the wings in midflight to turn the plane and to stop it from rolling laterally in the air.
When the Wrights discovered that a light-weight gas-powered engine did not exist, they decided to design and build their own. It produced 12 horsepower and weighed only 152 lbs. Result: the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over 600 lbs. On Dec. 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer lifted off shakily from the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., and flew 120 ft. — a distance little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting humans to new heights of freedom and giving us access to places we had never dreamed of reaching.
１０．Margaret Sanger
Freedom Fighter: 1879-1966
By Gloria Steinem | July 24, 2012 | +
Born into an Irish working-class family, Margaret Sanger witnessed her mother’s slow death, worn out after 18 pregnancies and 11 live births. While working as a practical nurse and midwife in the poorest neighborhoods of New York City before World War I, she saw women deprived of their health, sexuality and ability to care for children already born. Contraceptive information was suppressed by clergy-influenced, physician-accepted laws. Yet the educated had access to such information and products.
This injustice inspired Sanger to defy church and state. In a series of articles called “What Every Girl Should Know,” then in her own newspaper The Woman Rebel and through local clinics that dispensed woman-controlled forms of birth control (a phrase she coined), she put information and power into the hands of women. Her brave and joyous life included fulfilling work, three children, two husbands, many lovers and a large network of friends and colleagues. Indeed, she lived as if she and everyone else had the right to control her or his own life. By word and deed, she pioneered the most radical, humane and transforming political movement of the 20th and 21st centuries.
１１．Albert Einstein
Relativity's Revelator: 1879-1955
By Walter Isaacson | July 24, 2012 | +
He was the greatest mind and paramount icon of our age, the kindly, absentminded professor whose wild halo of hair, piercing eyes, engaging humanity and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius: Albert Einstein.
During his spare time as a young technical officer in a Swiss patent office in 1905, the young German produced three papers that changed science forever. The first described how light could behave not only like a wave but also like a stream of particles, called quanta or photons. This wave-particle duality became the foundation of what is known as quantum physics. It also provided theoretical underpinnings for such 20th century advances as television, lasers and semiconductors. The second paper confirmed the existence of molecules and atoms by statistically showing how their random collisions explained the jerky motion of tiny particles in water.
But it was his third paper that truly upended the universe. It was based, like much of Einstein’s work, on a thought experiment: no matter how fast one is moving toward or away from a source of light, the speed of that light beam will appear the same, a constant 186,000 miles per second. But space and time will appear relative. The special theory of relativity went on to show that energy and matter were merely different faces of the same thing, their relationship defined by the most famous equation in physics: energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, E=mc². Although not exactly a recipe for an atom bomb, the theory explained why one was possible.
In 1916 Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which posited gravity as a warping of space-time. It took three years for astronomers to prove the theory by showing how the sun’s gravity shifted light coming from a star. The results were announced at a meeting of the Royal Society in London presided over by J.J. Thomson, who in 1897 had discovered the electron. After glancing up at a grand portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas told the assemblage, “Our conceptions of the fabric of the universe must be fundamentally altered.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Democracy's Defender: 1882-1945
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
The second world war found democracy fighting for its life. By 1941 there were only a dozen or so democratic states left on earth. But great leadership emerged in time to rally the democratic cause. Future historians, looking back at the bloody 20th century, will likely regard Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the leader most responsible for mobilizing democratic energies and faith, first against economic collapse and then against military terror.
F.D.R. was the best-loved and most hated U.S. President of the 20th century. He was loved because, though patrician by birth, upbringing and style, he believed in and fought for plain people — for the “forgotten man” (and woman), for the “third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” He was loved because he radiated personal charm, joy in his work, optimism for the future.
But he was hated too — hated because he called for change, and the changes he proposed reduced the power, status, income and self-esteem of those who profited most from the old order. For decades, his New Deal reforms were accepted as familiar, benign and beneficial, although in recent years such government-run social programs have again come under critical scrutiny.
He was not a perfect man. In the service of his objectives, he could be devious, guileful, manipulative, underhanded, even ruthless. But he had great strengths. He relished wielding power and rejoiced in party combat. He was a realist in means but an idealist in ends. Above all, F.D.R. stood for humanity against ideology; against the totalitarians’ love of abstractions, he wanted to find practical ways to help decent men and women make a better world for themselves and their children. An optimist who fought his own brave way back from polio, he brought confidence and hope to a frightened and stricken nation.
１３．Louis Armstrong
Trailblazing Musician: 1901-1971
By Stanley Crouch | July 24, 2012 | +
Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He had perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. He was a small man, but the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music and around the world has continuing stature; he supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.
He grew up poor, hustling and hustling. Yet his world was not dominated by the deprivation of poverty but by the ceremonial vigor of the Negroes of New Orleans and their music: rags, blues, snippets from opera, church music and whatever else. At the Colored Waifs’ Home, young Louis first put his lips to the mouthpiece of a cornet; soon he was formidable. Musicians then were wont to have “cutting sessions” — battles of imagination and stamina. From 1920 on, young Louis was hell on two feet if somebody challenged him. Fairly soon, he was left alone. He took his music to Chicago, then to New York City, where his improvised melodies and singing set the city on its head. The stiff rhythms of the time were slashed away by his combination of the percussive and the soaring. His combination of virtuosity, strength and passion was unprecedented. No one in Western music — not even Bach — has ever set the innovative pace on an instrument , then stood up to sing and converted the vocalists. He did.
Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a genius from New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new terms. He bent and twisted pop songs until they were shorn of sentimentality and elevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, the most revolutionary rhythm of the 20th century. Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo.
１４．James Watson
Code Cracker: Born 1928
By Walter Isaacson | July 24, 2012 | +
The 20th century’s greatest biological breakthrough was announced unceremoniously on Feb. 28, 1953, when British scientist Francis Crick (on right, above) winged into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and declared that he and his younger U.S. partner, James Watson, had “found the secret of life.”
That morning Watson had sketched out how four chemical bases paired to create a self-copying code at the core of the double-helix-shaped DNA molecule, heredity’s master switch. In their more formal one-page paper in the journal Nature, they noted the significance of their discovery in a famously understated sentence: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” But they were less restrained when asking Watson’s sister to type up the paper for them. “We told her,” Watson wrote in his account of their discovery, The Double Helix, “that she was participating in perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin’s book.” Another woman played a more significant role: X-ray diffraction images taken by British scientist Rosalind Franklin helped the two men describe the double-helical structure of DNA and spark an ongoing biological revolution.
１５．Martin Luther King Jr.
American Dreamer: 1929-68
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
Taking his marching orders directly from Mohandas Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became the public face — and the eloquent voice — of the movement for black civil rights in the U.S. The son of a Georgia preacher, he followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming pastor of a congregation in Montgomery, Ala. It was there, in the mid-1950s, that he emerged as a leader in the struggle for black equality, as he led the 385-day long strike against the city bus company’s segregationist policies. By the time of his assassination in 1968, King’s crusade to win equal rights for U.S. blacks had largely been won, legislated into law by two historic civil rights acts. Yet he did more, helping free whites from the burden of their dishonorable prejudices.
How did he do it? As a preacher, he spoke in biblical cadences ideally suited to leading a stride toward freedom that found inspiration in Old Testament tales of the Israelites. His ministry put him in touch with the black masses in their churches, strongest of America’s black institutions. He was a man of physical courage whose belief in nonviolence never wavered — even when his home was bombed, with his wife and children inside. His eloquence equalled Lincoln’s as he urged Americans to embrace his dream of a land where all are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
１６．Muhammad Ali
Iconic Athlete: 1942-
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 | +
Few human beings have been so deified in their own time. Then again, few humans have spent so much of their own time deifying themselves. “I am the greatest!” Muhammad Ali often declared — and eventually, most people came around to share his view. Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Ky., he was a prankster from childhood, and merriment always seemed to be bubbling just below his surface, sweetening his braggadocio with just the right amount of sugar. After earning fame by winning the gold medal in light-heavyweight boxing at the Rome Olympics in 1960, he rose quickly to the top of the pro ranks, prancing and dancing in the ring as no boxer ever had before, yet able to throw and take punches of terrific force.
By 1964, the “Louisville Lip” was the world champ. A modern-day P.T. Barnum, Clay had reached into boxing’s then tawdry backroom and dragged his sport back into the limelight, laughing all the way. But there was more to Clay than the amusing rhymes and the silly pranks, as Americans soon discovered: that year he declared himself a member of the Nation of Islam, a controversial movement that sought to empower African Americans, christening himself Muhammad Ali.
Many Americans now denounced the brash boxer as a radical, and he was even more widely vilified when he refused to join the Army as the Vietnam War escalated. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” he memorably declared. He was found guilty of refusing induction into the service in 1967, and the boxing commission quickly revoked his license to fight; the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision in 1971.
Ali was idle for more than three years when he was at the height of his powers. Yet when he returned, he expressed no bitterness, and he still had the old magic. He won back the title in 1974 by knocking out George Foreman in their fight in Zaïre — the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Another international bout, the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila,” in which he beat Joe Frazier, helped Ali become the best-known person on the planet — and, it seemed, the most beloved. In later years, his uncomplaining battle with Parkinson’s Disease further cemented his status as a global icon of courage, grace and good will.
１７．Steve Jobs
Digital Visionary: 1955-2011
By TIME Staff | July 24, 2012 |
He was the high priest of the computer age, and as the pancreatic cancer that would kill him at age 56 took its toll, he appeared ever more gaunt and ascetic in his uniform of jeans and black turtleneck at the live introductions of his latest Apple products. There was always something of the monkish seeker about Steve Jobs, from his days as a part-time student at Reed College in Oregon, through his Wanderjahr in Asia to his pursuit of perfection in the dazzling products he and his colleagues created.
His business career started where all the best Silicon Valley stories begin: with two pals fiddling with computers in a garage. While IBM and other large firms were creating huge mainframe machines, Jobs and his software-genius partner, Steve Wozniak, cooked up the first small personal computer, the Apple II. Then, thanks to a visit to Xerox’s local research lab, Jobs got a glimpse of the future: a computer with a graphical design interface, operated by a mouse. Inspired, he drove his Apple team to create a giant stride forward in digital design, the Macintosh computer. Debuting in 1984, it swept the world, and by age 25, Jobs’s net worth was $100 million. But he was a tough, abrasive, pushy manager, and after his failings as an executive led to his ouster from his own company, Jobs entered a period of exile in which he founded a new computer company, NeXT, and ran Pixar, an innovative studio that revolutionized film animation with its 1995 computer-generated hit, Toy Story.
By 1997 Apple was on the skids, a victim of executives who lacked Jobs’ vision. He returned to his former company, retooled it — and commenced the greatest comeback in business history, introducing a clutch of breakthrough products that created a new digital landscape: the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad. Apple’s retail outlets became the highest-grossing stores in the world, and as of 2012, Apple was the world’s most valuable company.
Jobs was a visionary whose great genius was for design: he pushed and pushed to make the interface between computers and people elegant, simple and delightful. He always claimed his goal was to create products that were “insanely great.” Mission accomplished.
アメリカのキリスト教事情
Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan GOP ticket reflects religious shift
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
By naming devout, conservative Catholic U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan to be his running mate, former governor Mitt Romney, once a Mormon bishop, did more than ensure the USA will have a Catholic vice president in 2013.
He established the first Republican ticket without a Protestant since 1860, when Abraham Lincoln, who belonged to no church, chose Maine Sen. Hannibal Hamlin, a Unitarian as his running mate, says Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
Yet today's GOP ticket — two Christians who are neither evangelical nor mainline Protestants — isn't a major marker of social change, University of California history professor David Hollinger says.
For a real sign of the decline of American mainline Protestantism, Hollinger looks to the Protestant-free U.S. Supreme Court: six Catholics and three Jews. The Romney-Ryan ticket is well in line with today's wider, less brand-specific Christian culture, he says.
The number of Americans who identify with a Protestant denomination has been steadily slipping from over 60% in the 1970s to 52% in 2010, says Duke University sociology professor Mark Chaves, who tracks religion statistics in the national General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center.
With this comes a shift in assumption about values, says Stephen Prothero, author of The American Bible, examining core civic, political, literary and religious texts of U.S history and society. "We can no longer assume when people speak of American values, they're speaking in terms of Protestants who dominated American religious and public life" since the nation's founding, Prothero says.
Besides the Supreme Court's makeup, he cites today's diversity in Congress, which has Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims.
The Bible isn't every candidate's go-to text any more. Prothero expects Vice President Biden, a Catholic, and Ryan to argue over their different views of Catholic social teachings rather than stand on Gospel quotations.
Some evangelicals claim Ryan as one of their own, says David Brody, chief political correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network and author of a book, The Teavangelicals.
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Brody says that Ryan, as a "dedicated pro-life, true blue conservative," is a Tea Party evangelical, too, because he stands for the movement's agenda of "fiscal austerity and social conservatism."
Silk, who blogs at Spiritual Politics, points out, "I haven't heard any Protestants complaining that Romney didn't pick one of their own. The default mode is 'Christian' and Catholics are seen in the Christian tent."
Mormons see themselves as Christian and many scholars, but not all evangelicals, agree.
There's history to this. Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1800s, "announced he had been called to set Christianity straight," says Robert Millet, professor of religion at Brigham Young University. Smith preached that the historic churches — their bishops, priests and pastors — had lost their divine authority and he offered a radically different vision of God, Jesus and the path to salvation.
Today, Millet says, "Mormons and Catholics are side by side with evangelicals in sharing very conservative beliefs in the traditional family, and in the idea that there are absolute truths and moral values."
The groups stand together in opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and a provision in Obama's health care law. It requires employers, including faith-based institutions, to provide or facilitate employee insurance coverage for contraception. When the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the rule an affront to religious liberty, Mormons were right with them, Millet says.
The Bishop John Wester of the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City says "we have a healthy relationship and work closely on issues of compassion."
Ultimately, the symbolism of the Romney-Ryan ticket may be that it doesn't matter any more which religion a candidate claims as long as he claims one, says Grant Wacker, professor of Christian history at Duke Divinity School. "It would be much more significant if the candidates had no faith or called themselves agnostics or unbelievers. That is still unimaginable in the USA today," Wacker says.
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アメリカ２党制政治と日常生活
*****
Even with Paul Ryan's visit, life in the Bay Area's most Republican place feels like a city of détente
By Josh Richman
Posted: 09/08/2012 12:49:23 PM PDT
DANVILLE -- GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's fundraising breakfast Saturday suited the Bay Area's most Republican town to a T: a low-key, deep-pocketed affair that got the job done without making waves.
Supporters gave or raised from $1,000 to $25,000 to attend the 8:15 a.m. event at the home of former San Francisco 49ers tight end Brent Jones and his wife, Dana. Local reporters weren't allowed in.
Ryan arrived at 8:45 a.m. and soon was seen posing for photos on the palatial home's patio with supporters who had given $10,000 or more. Later, applause and cheers were heard from behind the house.
The Wisconsin congressman left in a black Chevy Suburban about 9:45 a.m., waving to a few neighbors as he headed down El Pintado Road. He was scheduled to visit Google in Mountain View for an online "hangout" with swing-state campaign volunteers Saturday afternoon before attending a fundraising dinner in Fresno.
Retiree Chuck DeHont paused near Jones' house while walking his two dogs to see what all the fuss was about. He wouldn't say whom he's likely to vote for, but said he's mostly "apolitical."
He noted that Republicans know California is a sure win for President Obama. "It does spare us the ads, at least," DeHont said.
He wasn't surprised to hear that Danville -- where 43.1 percent of registered voters are Republicans -- is the reddest spot in the very blue Bay Area, but said the town doesn't wear this on its sleeve.
"There aren't many hot-and-heavy rabid types around here,'' he said. "Everybody's entitled to their opinion. At least most people here seem to be well-informed."
Sharon Carter, a Democrat who lives nearby, joked about running home to fetch some eggs to throw, adding that she doesn't believe the ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan "has anything to offer me."
Carter, a consultant for PG&E, said she moved to Danville three years ago and has never felt unwelcome.
"I had friends who grew up here, and I always loved the area -- not the politics, obviously," she said, adding that she's volunteering Tuesday at an Obama campaign phone bank. "I do plan to get some yard signs ... and we'll see if I get any repercussions as a result of that. I haven't tested it, but I plan to."
Another neighbor, who said she's a Danville native, felt "very proud" that Ryan was in town. "He seems very knowledgeable and quick on his feet. He knows his facts ... and he seems like a good, moral man to look up to."
"That goes for the whole ticket," her husband chimed in, adding he's confident Ryan "will help get the budget under control."
Yet they wouldn't give their names lest Bay Area employers and residents ostracize them for their views.
Indeed, to the Bay Area's GOP minority, Danville might look like an island of conservative sanity in the middle of a lake of liberal lunacy, a bastion where right-thinking humans hold off the lefty zombie hordes.
To liberal Democrats, however, Danville might look like a wildlife refuge where the one percent runs free in its gated, country-club-like habitat, feeding on Republican red meat and drinking working-class sweat.
But to Danville residents, it looks like a city of détente, a place that values getting along over partisan breast-beating.
Jerome Pandell and Michael Caporusso remain friends more than a decade after meeting as debate team rivals, even though Pandell now is a fundraising "bundler" for President Obama and a 2012 Democratic National Convention delegate, while Caporusso is a former Contra Costa County GOP director now helping to lead the local Romney-Ryan campaign.
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In 2010, Pandell and Caporusso argued nose-to-nose over the county registrar's ballot tallies after a hot congressional election. Then they went to lunch together.
That's Danville, Pandell said: "It's a nice enough place where even if we Democrats occasionally feel we're in the minority, we can still sit down and have a bite with our friends on the other side of the aisle."
Caporusso agreed: "We were always able to have that dialogue, that discourse, and then have the common bond of the community to come back to when we were done."
Both describe Danville as an archetypical American town -- a bit of the Midwest transplanted to the coast. That's not entirely so: U.S. Census data show it's more than twice as rich and college-educated than the nation or the state -- and also much whiter. But it's an image the town cherishes. "Life's good for folks, and there's no need to be hyper-partisan one way or the other," Caporusso said.
When it comes to the town's upkeep, "it's not a liberal pothole, it's not a conservative pothole," said Mayor Newell Arnerich, a Democrat. "We're fiscally responsible, we save our money and we try not to build things just because we want them."
Behind closed curtains at the polls, though, Republicans rule.
Only two Democrats have carried Danville in presidential, gubernatorial or U.S. Senate votes since 1992: President Barack Obama in 2008, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein all four times she has run. Feinstein, however, might be kissing Danville goodbye this year. Her Republican challenger in November, Elizabeth Emken, lives here.
But don't start mouthing off about that race, or any other, at Elliott's Bar on Hartz Avenue.
Owner Dale Stockbridge called Danville "a bedroom community where everyone does their own thing" politically -- but not in the bar he has tended since 1976.
If patrons start trading political rhetoric, "we make them shut up," he said. "The first things you're going to get fights over are women and politics, so I put the kibosh on politics right off the bat."
Josh Richman covers politics. Contact him at 510-208-6428. Follow him at Twitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
a few red dots IN a sea of blue
Only six Bay Area cities have more registered Republicans than Democrats:
Danville: 43.1%
Atherton,: 42.5%
Hillsborough: 40.7%
Clayton: 39%
Monte Sereno: 38.6%
Los Altos Hills: 35.3%
BAY AREA'S FIVE MOST DEMOCRATIC CITIES
Richmond: 67.8%
Oakland: 66.5%
Berkeley: 65.9%
San Pablo: 65.6%
Albany: 64.7%
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Myanmar democratic activist accepts top congressional honorBy the CNN Wire Staff
updated 10:54 AM EDT, Thu September 20, 2012
(CNN) -- Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar democratic freedom activist who spent 15 years under house arrest, accepted the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday.
Suu Kyi called the ceremony one of the most moving days of her life.
"From the depths of my heart, I thank you, the people of America and you, their representatives," she said to the gathered members of Congress, "for keeping us in your hearts and minds during the dark years when freedom and justice seemed beyond our reach."
Sen. John McCain was overcome with emotion when he, among other political heavyweights in Washington, praised Suu Kyi.
McCain called Suu Kyi "his personal hero."
"They did all they could to break her," the Arizona Republican said of the military junta that detained her. McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam, choked up, his voice breaking.
"Aung San Suu Kyi didn't scare a damn," he told the crowd.
McCain's comments were met with wild applause.
Suu Kyi was kept for the better part of two decades under house arrest for advocating for democracy in Myanmar, also known as Burma. The country's former military rulers ordered her detention, and in recent years her case has received an international spotlight. She paid a hefty personal price for standing up for freedom in Myanmar, which suffered under 50 years of autocratic, repressive rule.
Suu Kyi, who was awarded the medal in 2008, was freed two years later and elected to the Myanmar parliament this year, a historic moment in the country.
"As I go forward with my countrymen and -women along the difficult path of building a truly democratic society where all our people can live together in peace -- remembering always that Burma is a nation of many ethnic nationalities and peoples -- we believe that we can go forward in unity and in peace, and give our friends the satisfaction of helping us get to ... a place where dreams are realized," she said in her acceptance speech.
The 67-year-old activist-turned-politician is on a 17-day tour of the United States. Suu Kyi met with President Barack Obama later Wednesday.
Obama "expressed his admiration for her courage, determination and personal sacrifice in championing democracy and human rights over the years," the White House said in a statement following the meeting.
He told Suu Kyi that the United States will continue to support the efforts of her and her party, in conjunction with the reformist Myanmar president, Thein Sein, to push for political and economic changes and "to ensure full protection of the fundamental rights of the Burmese people," according to the statement.
Over the next two weeks, Suu Kyi is scheduled to meet with other high-level American officials, as well as democratic activists. Also Wednesday, she met with U.S. Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, among others.
At the start of her visit Tuesday, she met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and made an address at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, during which she said she supported the further easing of U.S. economic sanctions on Myanmar.
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"I do not think we should depend on U.S. sanctions to keep up the momentum of our movement for democracy," she said. "We have got to work at it ourselves."
The U.S. Treasury Department, meanwhile, lifted sanctions Wednesday on Thein Sein and parliament member Thura Shwe Mann, allowing them do do business with Americans again.
Also Wednesday, Clinton compared Suu Kyi with another famous political prisoner.
She said she was reminded when she visited Suu Kyi during her house arrest that she saw similarities to Nelson Mandela.
"These two political prisoners were separated by great distances, but they were both marked by uncommon grace, generosity of spirit and unshakable will," Clinton said Wednesday. "And they both understood something we all have to grasp. The day they walked out of prison, the day the house arrest was ended, was not the end of the struggle. It was the beginning of a new phase."
Under Thein Sein, the Myanmar government has released hundreds of political prisoners in the past year, part of a series of reforms that have followed decades of repressive military rule. Western governments have responded to the efforts by starting to ease sanctions put in place to pressure the military regime.
Myanmar authorities have also engaged in peace talks with rebel ethnic groups and allowed Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, to successfully participate in special elections for the national parliament in April.
Suu Kyi and others have nonetheless cautioned that progress toward greater freedoms in Myanmar remains embryonic and fragile.
"I think one of the important reasons for her visit at this time is to remind us of how much more still lies ahead, from strengthening the rule of law in democratic institutions to addressing the challenges in many of the ethnic conflicts and in Rakhine state," Clinton said Tuesday in an introduction to Suu Kyi's address.
Communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine this summer killed scores of people and displaced thousands of others. Human rights advocates have accused the authorities of cracking down particularly harshly on the Rohingya, a stateless ethnic Muslim minority, during the unrest.
Suu Kyi's U.S. trip coincides with a visit to New York by Thein Sein to attend the U.N. General Assembly, where he will meet with Clinton.
On Monday, the Myanmar government announced that it was releasing more than 500 prisoners as part of an amnesty. Suu Kyi said Tuesday that her party calculates that there were about 90 political prisoners among those released.
Between 200 and 400 political prisoners remain behind bars in Myanmar, according to different estimates.
Earlier this year, Suu Kyi visited Thailand, her first trip abroad since her release from house arrest, and then traveled to Europe, where she finally collected the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991.
As part of her U.S. tour, she will visit Fort Wayne, Indiana, home to one of the United States' largest populations of Burmese expatriates. Since the early 1990s, about 5,000 Burmese have carved out a life there.
CNN's Ashley Fantz in Atlanta; and Jethro Mullen and Paul Armstrong in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
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オバマ政権の財政投融資政策と大幅な財政赤字の中身。
****
Missing in Action: Stimulus Sheriff Joe Biden
By Michelle Malkin • October 10, 2012 07:07 AM
Remember when President Obama bragged about Joe Biden’s fiscal discipline cred in 2009? “To you, he’s Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff,” Obama warned government employees. “Because if you’re misusing taxpayer money, you’ll have to answer to him.”
Fast-forward to 2012. Call in the search teams. Since being appointed the nation’s stimulus spending cop, Sheriff Joe has taken a permanent donut break. He’s AWOL on oversight. In fact, he’s been bubble-wrapped, boxed and kept completely out of sight. The garrulous gaffe machine hasn’t sat down for a national media interview in five months.
The Democrats’ trillion-dollar “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” however, keeps piling up waste, failure, fraud and debt. Who benefited most? Big government cronies.
According to Investor’s Business Daily this week, a new analysis by Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that “(m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by President Obama’s economic stimulus in the first year were in government.”
Dupor and another colleague had earlier concluded that the porkulus was a predictable jobs-killer that crowded out non-government jobs with make-work public jobs and programs. Indeed, the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.”
Will this Keynesian wreckage come up during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate? It should be a centerpiece of domestic policy discussion. Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider.
Remember: Obama’s Ivy League eggheads behind the stimulus promised that “(m)ore than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.” These are the same feckless economic advisers who infamously vowed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent — and that unemployment would drop below 6 percent sometime this year.
Sheriff Joe rebuked the “naysayers” who decried the behemoth stimulus program’s waste, fraud and abuse. “You know what? They were wrong,” he crowed.
But Biden was radio silent about the nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients who received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds — while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes. (Cash for Tax Cheats, anyone?)
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He had nothing to say about the $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners that went to nearly a third of credit-claimers who had no record of homeownership, including minors and prisoners.
And the $530 million dumped into the profligate Detroit public schools for laptops and other computer equipment that have had little, if any, measurable academic benefits.
And the whopping $6.7 million cost per job under the $50 billion stimulus-funded green energy loan program — which funded politically connected but now bankrupt solar firms Solyndra ($535 million), Abound Solar ($400 million), Beacon Power ($43 million), A123 ($250 million) and Ener1 ($119 million).
And the $1 million in stimulus cash that went to Big Bird and Sesame Street “to promote healthy eating,” which created a theoretical “1.47″ jobs. (As Sean Higgins of The Examiner noted, “(T)hat comes out to about $726,000 per job created.”)
And the hundreds of millions in stimulus money steered to General Services Administrations junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii, ghost congressional districts, dead people, infrastructure to nowhere and ubiquitous stimulus propaganda road signs stamped with the shovel-ready logo.
Of course, there’s no example of unfettered stimulus squandering more fitting than the one named after Keystone Fiscal Kop Joe Biden himself. Government-funded Amtrak’s Wilmington, Del., station raked in $20 million in “recovery” money after heavy personal lobbying by the state’s most prominent customer and cheerleader. In return, the station (which came in $6 million over budget, according to The Washington Times) renamed its facility after Biden.
Bloated costs. Crony political narcissism. Glaring conflicts of interest. Monumental waste. This is the Obama/Biden stimulus legacy bequeathed to our children and their grandchildren. Sheriff Joe and his plundering boss need to be run out of town on a rail.
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グローバル化の中で経済繁栄するアメリカは日本の将来を占う。日本の教育システムへの大きな警告でもある。
****
Apple Products Create Jobs in America
October 18, 2012 Rush Limbaugh in his radio show
All Audio & Video »
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, something fascinating came up the other night in a debate, and I wanted to mention it the other day, and I didn't get to it. Candy Crowley brought up the Apple example and manufacturing. And the example was that not one Apple product is made in America, and yet they're the largest company in the country, they sell gazillions of products, and not one of them is manufactured in the United States, and of course the hand-wringing and, "Oh, what can we do? Can we bring that back? Oh, my God."
There's a simple reality. The last time Apple products were really manufactured in this country, you've gotta go back to when John Sculley ran the company, the early nineties. Apple had two factories, and they could stamp out a million Macs a day, computers. There was no iPhone at this point in time, just the Macintosh. They had two factories. One was in California, I think Fremont, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in California. The other one was in Cork, Ireland. But the iPhone, the iPod, the current iteration of the iMac, all the Macintosh line of computers, the iPad, have never been made in America. Those are not jobs lost. Those are not manufacturing jobs that have somehow been squandered and lost.
Those products have never been made here. However, they wouldn't exist without American ingenuity. All of the industrial design, all of the software engineering, many of the components for the various products, all of them are designed here, every damn one of them is designed here. Many of the components inside, the chips, made here. If you want to go ancillary, okay, so Apple sold five million iPhones in the first weekend that it was on sale, and everybody wrings their hands, "None of them are manufactured in America. We've lost our manufacturing base." No, the iPhone was never made here.
But what did it take to get those iPhones in everybody's hands? It took airplanes. FedEx, an American company. Apple buys out FedEx routes for weeks leading up to the release of a product. Then once the iPhones got here, where did they go? They went to Apple stores, they went to carrier stores, they went to individuals' homes. They had to be delivered by somebody. UPS delivered some, FedEx delivered some, people picked them up themselves.
The Apple Store has its own employees. The number of jobs that Apple creates or facilitates, despite the fact that their products are manufactured (or assembled, I should say) in China would astound people if they ever stopped and looked at it. There are plenty of jobs in this country that are being filled and that are necessary because of Apple, even though their products are manufactured there.
By the way, I'm not speaking to you as an Apple fanboy. I'm speaking to you once again strictly in economic terms. Apple is not a drag on the US economy, even though those products are not manufactured here. Those are jobs that are never gonna come back. Have you ever stopped to think...? The iPhone 5 right now, they can't make enough. They are selling every iPhone they make.
They have had the fastest rollout, international rollout of a product ever. The iPhone is on sale in more countries than any phone at this stage of its release date as any product they've ever had. They simply can't make enough. And one of the reasons is I don't think Apple was prepared to be number one, frankly. I can't get my arms around their manufacturing. Their phones, their products, their computers, the iPads, the iPhones, the iPods.
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All these are made by one company called Hon Hai Precision, Foxconn, and they've got factories all over China, factories that employ 300,000 people. The total number of employees of the manufacturing firm is over one million. It takes five days to make an iPad, I read. Manual labor, five days. I don't know what it is for an iPhone. One of the reasons the manufacturer says the iPhone's late or tough to get is because its design is so intricate.
It's the thinnest and the lightest and it just takes a long time to put one of these things together, and it is really hard because it's so miniaturized. It's so technically advanced. The way manufacturing and union jobs are in this country, those jobs would never exist here. Nobody could afford an iPhone manufactured in this country. But just as an aside, I'm not capable of understanding how it's done anyway.
I don't know how a million people spread out over factories throughout China -- there's even a couple in Brazil now -- turn these things out in the quantity they do. All handmade. Now, the components are not handmade. Some of those are precision made, but the assembly is all done by hand. And the volume, the number of devices! They've got a new miniature iPad that they're gonna be announcing in a week, and they're not gonna have enough of those.
I frankly don't know how they get all these things made. I can't conceive it. I'd have to go to China, see one of these factories, and see how it's done. I can't conceive it. But that's just an aside. The bottom line is that those jobs were never here. We didn't lose those jobs. And the jobs that are related to all those products are real, and they are American jobs, and the intellectual content -- the stuff that makes those iPhones valuable -- is all made and designed here.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I don't know where to stop when talking about Apple. Look at the people that make accessories for all their products: the cases, the external batteries, the chargers. It really represents total economic ignorance to sit here and wring your hands and worry about the fact that the iPhone, the iPad, whatever, is not made in the United States. The economic activity associated with the assembly of those products over there by the ChiComs is incalculable.
Well, you could calculate it, but it would stun you.
オバマの出生地の疑問を仄めかすだけで、オバマを支援するメデアが攻撃する一例。オバマのハワイ出生地への疑問を投げかける事実があるにもかかわらず、保守派の陰謀として、真実から目を背けさせる努力がいたるところに見られる。
*****
Candidate's son makes Obama/Kenya joke
3:12PM EDT October 15. 2012 - The campaign of a Republican Senate candidate has apologized for a Kenya joke about President Obama made by the candidate's son.
Jason Thompson, the son of former governor and current Senate candidate Tommy Thompson, told a brunch sponsored by the Kenosha County Republican Party: "We have the opportunity to send President Obama back to Chicago -- or Kenya."
One woman said: "We are taking donations for that Kenya trip."
Obama's father was born in Kenya, but the president was born in Honolulu.
The Huffington Post picks up the story:
"The video was taken by a Democratic Party operative and posted at BuzzFeed Politics on Sunday, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. ...
'The governor has addressed this with his son, just like any father would do,' the campaign said in a statement. 'Jason Thompson said something he should not have, and he apologizes.'
Democratic Rep. Tammy Baldwin is running against Thompson. Her campaign's spokesman, John Kraus, said Monday that the Thompson campaign is becoming increasingly desperate and dishonest.
The candidate himself 'has not apologized for these comments, nor has he disavowed them,' Kraus wrote. 'Thompson needs to start taking responsibility for what his campaign says and does.'"
オバマ大統領の謎に迫る。メディアやオバマ支持派は冗談として流しているが、この記事で問題とされる、今年ホワイトハウスに掲載された出生証明書（birth certificate）は地方の警察による専門家やその他多数が偽造と認定している（Youtube参照）。疑惑は深まるばかり。オバマの謎を解明するためにメデアを通しての発表がこれ。それを受けたメデアやオバマ支持派の反応はどうか。いつもながらフェイスブックその他で冗談として扱い、偽造の事実さえ信じないばかりか、世間の目を反らさせているのがとても印象的。
*****
Donald Trump's Announcement - Obama Challenge - Official Statement
Official Press Release By Territory Media
Official - STATEMENT FROM DONALD J. TRUMP
New York, October 24, 2012 - President Obama is the least transparent President in the history of this country. Sadly, we know very little about a large portion of our President's life and, in fact, he has spent millions of dollars in legal fees to make sure that it stays that way. I am very honored to have gotten President Obama to release his long form birth certificate, or whatever it was that he released. This was something that neither John McCain nor Hilary Clinton were able to get him to do during their very long and bitter political campaigns despite the fact that they were strong in demanding it's release (nobody knows why he would not do it). Many Americans have serious questions --- questions that should not be part of the presidential dialogue. Over the course of the last year, millions of people have contacted me via my social media pages (Twitter.com/realDonaldTrump, Facebook.com/DonaldTrump) seeking my assistance to have this extremely important issue settled once and for all. While they may have the thought and concern, they feel that they lack the ability to get this done. Essentially, a large portion of American people are asking me to serve as their spokesperson.
It is for this reason that I have a deal for the President --- a deal that I do not believe he can refuse. If Barack Obama agrees (or has the universities and colleges agree) to give all ofhis college records and applications and if he provides all of his passport records and applications, I will give to a charity of his choice (inner city children in Chicago, American Cancer Society, AIDS research, etc.) a check for five million dollars. The check will be given immediately after he releases the records so stated, or causes said records to be released. If he chooses to do this, he will be doing a great service not only to the charity, but also a great service to the country and indeed, himself.
If he releases these records it will end the question, and indeed the anger, of many Americans. Their President will become transparent like other Presidents. So all he has to do to collect five million dollars for a charity of his choice, is get his universities and colleges to immediately give his complete applications and records and also to release his passport information. When he does that to my satisfaction, and if it's complete, the check will be delivered immediately. A lot of people will be very, very happy to see this happen.
Frankly, it's a check that I very much want to write. I absolutely would be the most happy of all if l did, in fact, make this contribution through the President to a charity of his choice. One caveat--- the records must be given by October 31st at 5pm in the afternoon.
So, Mr. President, not only will I be happy, and totally satisfied, but the American people will be happy and the selected charity will be very, very happy. Thank you, Mr. President!
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Donald John Trump, Sr. (born June 14, 1946) is an American business magnate, television personality and author. He is the chairman and president of The Trump Organization and the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Trump's extravagant lifestyle, outspoken manner and role on the NBC reality show The Apprentice have made him a well-known celebrity who was No. 17 on the 2011 Forbes Celebrity 100 list.
Trump is the son of Fred Trump, a wealthy New York City real-estate developer. He worked for his father's firm, Elizabeth Trump & Son, while attending the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1968 officially joined the company. He was given control of the company in 1971 and renamed it The Trump Organization.
In 2010, Trump expressed an interest in becoming a candidate for President of the United States in the 2012 election. In May 2011, he announced he would not be a candidate, but a few weeks later he said he had not completely ruled out the possibility. In December 2011, Trump was suggested as a possible Vice Presidential selection by Michele Bachmann. Bachmann later ended her presidential campaign.
オバマ大統領がケニアで生まれた複数の証拠の中に、父方の祖母の証言を上げている。
****
Evidence Obama Born In Kenya Goes Beyond 1991 Brochure
Establishment media pulls stunt in effort to diffuse ‘birther’ controversy
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, May 18, 2012
The establishment media hastily seized on yesterday’s explosive story about a literary publication listing Barack Obama’s birthplace as Kenya in an effort to claim that the 1991 brochure was the “origin” of the entire ‘birther’ issue. In reality, evidence that Obama was born in the African country is abundant.
A literary agent’s promotional text for a 1991 brochure released yesterday by Breitbart.com states Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
Yahoo News, along with a deluge of other mainstream news outlets, responded by reporting that the document was potentially the “source” of the birther controversy and had merely been a mistake.
The literary agent who wrote the description, Miriam Goderich, now works with Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its clients. Unsurprising therefore that Goderich hastily claimed listing Obama’s birthplace as Kenya was “nothing more than a fact checking error.”
However, evidence to indicate that Obama war born in Kenya is plentiful and it goes significantly beyond the 1991 version of the brochure.
- Despite claiming the passage about Obama’s birthplace being Kenya was a mistake, the listing still maintained that Obama’s birthplace was Kenya until after Obama became a U.S. Senator. “Goderich’s statement fails to explain why the “fact checking error” persisted for sixteen years, through at least three different versions of Jane Dystel’s website, and through at least four different versions of Obama’s biography,” reports Breitbart.com.
- The literary agency also updated the text in June 1998, but the part about Obama being born in Kenya was retained.
- The text was again updated in February 2005 to reflect the fact that Obama had become a Senator, but Kenya was still listed as his birthplace.
- After an April 2007 modification of the text, the passage still read Obama, “was born in Kenya.”
- As Steve Boman reveals, the Dystel & Goderich agency asks its clients to submit their own biography, meaning it’s virtually impossible the listing of Obama’s birthplace as Kenya could have been a “fact checking error” on behalf of the literary company itself.
- During a speech about HIV, First Lady Michelle Obama said she and Barack Obama “visited his home country of Kenya.” Watch the clip below.
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- In 2008, Obama’s paternal step grandmother appeared to indicate publicly that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. In an interview conducted by American Christian minister Ron McRae, Sarah Obama was asked, ‘Were you present when your grandson was born in Kenya?’” McRae testified in his sworn statement. “This was asked to her in translation twice, and both times she replied, “Yes! Yes she was! She was present when Obama was born.”
- Another source who met Sarah Obama told World Net Daily, “I have keenly and attentively listened to the tape over and over again, and I can confirm from Sarah’s own confession that Barack Obama was born in Kenya in her presence.”
- A separate Kenyan government official agreed, stating, “I have listened to the tape. The preacher asked whether Barack Obama was born in Mombassa, and the translator asked the same. When she said Mombassa, it was like a surprise, and those there thought she could not have meant to say Mombassa.”
- When New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi traveled to Kenya to investigate the claims, he was almost immediately kicked out of the country by Kenyan officials.
- When Kenya’s National Security Intelligence Service investigated claims that Obama was born in Kenya, officials in Nairobi found “relevant birth records may have been removed or were missing.”
- Obama has deep political connections in Kenya. From 2006 onwards he rallied in support of Islamist Raila Odinga in Kenya, helping him impose Sharia law. When Odinga lost the Kenyan election in 2008, his supporters rioted, unleashing a wave of violence. Despite the bloodshed, Obama used his influence to aid Odinga in retaining his position as part of a coalition government.
For the mainstream media to imply that the 1991 brochure is the “source” of the claim that Obama was born in Kenya is completely inaccurate. Not only was that brochure updated many times right up until 2007, with the information about Obama’s birthplace being Kenya retained, but there are numerous other factors which all indicate that Kenya could indeed be Obama’s homeland.
−-------
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Friday, May 18, 2012 at 8:56 am
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More and more pundits on both political sides are taking the electoral leap and predicting a landslide for Mitt Romney. Here are some notable ones:
1. CNBC Anchor Larry Kudlow
Photo Credit: CNBC
Kudlow said on his CNBC show “The Kudlow Report” on Oct. 25: ”I am now predicting a 330 vote electoral landslide.”
2. MSNBC Host Joe Scarborough
Photo Credit: NBC.com
Based on Scarborough’s insights on Politico:
“But my gut tells me there are two likely scenarios: (1) President Obama will squeak out a narrow Electoral College victory or (2) Mitt Romney will carry Ohio and be swept into office by a comfortable margin.
After practicing politics for 20 years, I suppose I would rather be in Mitt Romney’s shoes than Barack Obama’s. Incumbents who are under 50 percent two weeks out usually go down to defeat.”
3. Strategist Karl Rove
Photo Credit: FoxNation.com
Rove said Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal:
“In addition to the data, the anecdotal and intangible evidence–from crowd sizes to each side’s closing arguments–give the sense that the odds favor Mr. Romney. They do. My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president. Let’s call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.”
4. Columnist George Will
Photo Credit: YAF.com
George Will outlined a huge Romney Election Day in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” predicting a 321-217 landslide that included nearly every swing state including Minnesota.
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Photo Credit: Mediaite.com
In a recent editorial for The Hill, Morris explained in detail his landslide prediction:
“Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure. The contrast does not work in Obama’s favor. His erosion began shortly after the conventions when Indiana (10 votes) and North Carolina (15) moved to Romney (in addition to the 179 votes that states that McCain carried cast this year).
Then, in October, Obama lost the Southern swing states of Florida (29) and Virginia (13). He also lost Colorado (10), bringing his total to 255 votes.And now, he faces the erosion of the northern swing states: Ohio (18), New Hampshire (4) and Iowa (6). Only in the union-anchored state of Nevada (9) does Obama still cling to a lead.
In the next few days, the battle will move to Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (15), Wisconsin (10) and Minnesota (16). Ahead in Pennsylvania, tied in Michigan and Wisconsin, and slightly behind in Minnesota, these new swing states look to be the battleground.”
Morris also predicted a huge day for the GOP in the Senate:
“The most likely outcome? Eight GOP takeaways and two giveaways for a net gain of six. A 53-47 Senate, just like we have now, only opposite. Barack Obama’s parting gift to the Democratic Party.”
6. Columnist Micheal Barone
Photo Credit: washingtonexaminer.com
The Washington Examiner columnist says Romney will walk away with 315 electoral votes:
”Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.”
7. Las Vegas oddsmaker Wayne Allen Root
Photo Credit: TheBalze.com
Root said in a column posted on FoxNews.com:
“I’m predicting a 5 to 7 point popular vote victory. Electorally it won’t even be that close. Romney will win many states that went to Obama in 2008. I’m predicting Romney victories in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Indiana. I predict a Romney victory by 100 to 120 electoral votes.”
BONUS: Israel
Photo Credit: MittRomney.com
Abe Katsman of the Times of Israel writes of the Romney landslide among American voting in Israel:
“The Presidential election results are in. Well, at least the votes from Americans in Israel. Not one to keep readers in suspense, I’ll reveal the most important numbers up front: Gov. Mitt Romney received 85%–85%!–of the vote; President Obama managed only 14.3%. This, according to exit polling just released by iVoteIsrael, the non-partisan group promoting and facilitating voting by U.S. citizens currently in Israel. Their statistics reveal some fascinating results. More importantly, these results have implications for the outcome of next week’s election. (Again, not to keep you in suspense: those implications favor the Republicans.)”
BONUS: Glenn Beck Radio Show
“321-217 victory for Romney in the electoral college.”
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The Democrat Party is oriented around the notion that people are incompetent, incapable, don't want to work, and will gladly turn their lives over to government.
And that's who Barack Obama's trying to win the election with. Your fears are justified. You see these people up close and personal. You don't understand them. You're a thinking person; you don't understand how in the world they can believe such ridiculous things that the comedian or whoever is telling them. But they do, is the bottom line. For now, they do. And yours is not to reason with them. Yours is not to change their minds now. You can't.
Yours is to outnumber them tomorrow.
That's our objective: We just have to outnumber 'em. You're part of that.
Just make sure you vote.
Take as many people with you as you can find.
−-----
"The Democrat Party is oriented around the notion that people are incompetent, incapable, don't want to work, and will gladly turn their lives over to government. And that's who Barack Obama's trying to win the election with."
Teacher allegedly tells class Obama’s re-election is ‘America’s funeral’
8:47 AM 11/12/2012
On November 7, an elementary school teacher in south central Louisiana allegedly told her class of fourth graders that she was “attending America’s funeral” because Barack Obama won the presidential election, according to a report by KATC, the local ABC television affiliate.
Students say the teacher, clad in all black that day, also said the United States will turn into a “new China” under Obama, KATC reports.
“She made the comment that since Michelle Obama is first lady and with the meal plan she has, the kids are gonna look like toothpicks in a few months,” parent Lindsey Shello told KATC.
Shello’s nine-year-old son is a student in the teacher’s class. She was outraged about the episode, and that the teacher had vented her feelings on Facebook.
The teacher, who is never named in the KATC report, reportedly requested a personal meeting with Shello. The teacher also cautioned Shello that her son might be embellishing the story.
However, other kids are apparently telling the same story. Another parent, Chassatey Jackson, says her children have related the same basic account, KATC reports.
Both parents agree that teachers should avoid expressing political opinions in fourth-grade classrooms.
“Her personal opinion needs to remain her personal opinion. She doesn’t need to push it on the kids,” said Shello, according to KATC.
Parents have reportedly contacted the principal at Delcambre Elementary as well as the local school board.
This incident certainly isn’t the first time in recent memory that a schoolteacher has been accused of interjecting personal political beliefs into the classroom.
Just last month, Linda White, an eighth-grade science teacher in Clinton, Mississippi, allegedly told her students of her belief that Obama is a Muslim and, for that reason, he should not serve a second term. White also reportedly told students she supports Romney because he is a “good Christian,” according to WJTV, the CBS affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi.
White has since resigned her teaching post.
Earlier in October, Lynette Gaymon, a geometry teacher at Charles Carroll High School in Philadelphia reportedly ridiculed sophomore Samantha Pawlucy for wearing a pro-Romney shirt to school and told Pawlucy to remove it. Gaymon allegedly called Carroll High a “Democratic school,” reports Philly.com. Gaymon, who is black, is also said to have suggested that the shirt was comparable to shirt supporting the Ku Klux Klan.
In the aftermath, Gaymon, the geometry teacher, reportedly received death threats, according to Philly.com. Pawlucy transferred to a different school.
In May of 2012, Tanya Dixon-Neely, a social studies teacher at North Rowan High School in Spencer, North Carolina, told a student in her class that could be arrested for criticizing Obama, and that people had been arrested for criticizing President George W. Bush. A student captured Dixon-Neely’s rant on hidden video, which later went viral on YouTube.
“Let me tell you something,” Dixon-Neely says in the video, “you will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom.”
The local school board suspended Dixon-Neely, but with pay, according to WBTV, the CBS television affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In 2009, a fairly disturbing video emerged on YouTube showing about 20 children at B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey singing pro-Obama anthems.
One song the children in New Jersey sang quotes directly from the spiritual “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” reports Fox News. However, the lyrics replace Jesus with Obama: “He said red, yellow, black or white/All are equal in his sight. Barack Hussein Obama.”
‘Bloody’ amazing NYU student invents wound-closing goo
By BOB FREDERICKS
Last Updated: 2:27 AM, March 18, 2013
Posted: 2:02 AM, March 18, 2013
A brainy NYU student has cooked up a magic gel that he says can stop even heavy bleeding — an invention that could make routine bandages obsolete.
Joe Landolina, 20, an Ulster County native and NYU junior, says his Veti-Gel almost instantly closes and begins healing even major wounds to internal organs and key arteries.
“There’s really no way to quickly stop bleeding except to hold lots of gauze on a wound,” Landolina told The Post. “I thought if you could pour this gel into a wound, it would solidify and stop the bleeding.”
Landolina, who is simultaneously pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biomolecular and chemical engineering and a master’s in biomedical engineering, created the substance with Isaac Miller, a 2013 NYU grad.
Brian ZakJoe Landolina The precocious entrepreneur first honed his scientific chops working at his grandparents’ winery, Baldwin Vineyards, in upstate Pine Bush.
“Once I realized this was what I wanted to do, I would spend nights in the library, reading about polymer science and about the biology of a wound,” he said.
The lifesaving goo is an artificial version of something called the extracellular matrix, which makes up the connective tissue that helps hold animal bodies together.
“We use plant-derived versions of the polymers that make up your skin,” the whiz kid said. “If they go into a wound, they build on existing polymers. It’s like it tells your body to stop bleeding.”
The aspiring scientist says he tested the stuff on rats and was able to stop bleeding instantly after slicing the rodents’ livers and carotid arteries.
After his rat experiments, Landolino moved on — to a slab of fresh pork loin — to create a video demonstration.
“I went to my neighborhood butcher in Brooklyn and said I needed the freshest meat you have, and it was pork loin,” he said.
On the video, he cuts a deep slice into the pork while it’s being injected with “real pigs blood,” he said.
The blood initially flows freely, but amazingly stops after Landolino applies the gel and a second liquid, which speeds coagulation, bringing the bloodshed to a sudden stop.
Landolina and Miller will next test the gel on larger living animals, like pigs and sheep, under the supervision of Dr. Herbert Dardik, a cardiovascular surgeon at Englewood (NJ) Hospital.
Alcohol and Drinking Facts in States across the U.S.
ALABAMA
About two of every three counties in Alabama are dry. That is, they prohibit the production, distribution and sale of any alcoholic beverages.
However, Alabama permits the sale of fireworks, tobacco and firearms and it does so with virtually no restrictions or regulations.
For example, there is no state permit required to purchase or carry rifles and shotguns, no licensing of owners of rifles or shotguns, and no registration of such deadly weapons. Similarly, there is no state permit needed to purchase a handgun, no licensing of handgun owners, and no registration of handguns. Even young children can carry and use dangerous firearms. 1
Alabamans apparently view a drink as more dangerous than fireworks, tobacco, or rifles, shotguns and pistols. Is a drink in the hand of a mature adult more dangerous than a gun in the hand of an immature child?
ALASKA
There are 83 dry towns and villages in Alaska. 2 In addition, Fairbanks is a dry town for moose, where it's illegal to feed a moose any alcoholic beverage. 3 Apparently they can’t hold their alcohol.
ARIZONA
The Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control recently raided a weekly senior citizens’ garden party within a gated community in Mesa. Agents seized the alcoholic beverages and wrote a citation for selling alcohol without a license.
Perhaps the Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control has too many officers and too much time on its hands. Or perhaps this over zealous enforcement is simply a reflection of the growing anti-alcohol movement in the United States. 4
ARKANSAS
Temperance members of the Russellville City council in Arkansas approved a motion censoring any discussion of legalizing alcohol sales during budget sessions. The motion was passed after the city's Revenue Task Force suggested legalizing alcohol sales.
It appears that the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protection of free speech won't apply Russellville's council as long as temperance-minded officials have their way. 5
CALIFORNIA
It is a violation of the California Alcoholic Beverage Control Act for producers of alcohol beverages to list the names of retailers or restaurants that sell their products in advertising or even in newsletters. 6
If it’s bad for producers, it’s even worse for servers in California, where they can be convicted of selling to a minor if the purchaser uses a false or altered ID to buy the alcohol. 7
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More lunacy in California: An award-winning adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood was withdrawn from a recommended reading list by the school board in Culver City, California, simply because the heroine had included a bottle of wine in the basket she brought to her grandmother. 8
COLORADO
Colorado law requires that wine be sold in containers of at least 24 ounces and spirits in containers at least a fifth of a gallon. But, at the same time, it also decrees that no alcohol beverage can be stored in hotel minibars in anything larger than miniature containers. 9 Ward Churchill must be teaching logic now.
CONNECTICUT
Connecticut is the only state in the northeast that hasn’t yet abolished Colonial-era Blue Laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol beverages on Sundays. 10
In addition, druggists in Connecticut must pay $400.00 each year for a license in order to use alcohol in compounding prescriptions. 11 Perhaps that’s why medications are so expensive in the state.
DELAWARE
A traveler through the Delaware Valley in 1753 compiled a list of the drinks he encountered; all but three of the 48 contained alcohol. 12
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
The District of Columbia has decriminalized underage drinking, making consumption of alcohol by those under age 21 a civil rather than criminal offense. Offenders will no longer be arrested and carry a criminal record for life.
The new legislation was passed because, although underage drinking had been decriminalized in 1997, police had continued to arrest young people for what was no longer a crime.
Neighboring Maryland has also decriminalized possession and consumption of alcohol by those under the age of 21. 13
FLORIDA
Don't plan on using any of the celebratory Champagne bottle sizes known as Methuselahs, Salamanazars, Balthazars or Nebuchadnezzars. These very traditional Champagne bottle sizes are all illegal in Florida. 14
GEORGIA
Georgia's Fulton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Arrington has handed down a decision calling the city of Atlanta's and the state of Georgia's ordinances against Sunday bar openings unconstitutional. 15
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IDAHO
Idaho's Driver's Manual misleads license applicants, stating that "The combination of drinking and driving accounts for approximately half of all fatal accidents. Alcohol Kills over 25,000 people a year on U.S. highways." 16 Not so.
The actual proportion of alcohol-related accidents is about 38% and the number of fatalities is also overstated by about two-thirds. Even worse, the manual converts alcohol-related into "accounts for." But alcohol-related does not mean caused by alcohol.
For example, when a person who has drunk some alcohol is waiting at a stop light and is rear-ended by a completely sober but careless driver, the resulting accident is considered an alcohol-related crash, although alcohol had nothing at all to do with causing it.
Of course, a single alcohol-caused accident is too many and we need to continue our progress in reducing these needless tragedies. To learn more visit Drinking and Driving.
ILLINOIS
Legislators in Illinois are preparing to consider a new law to lower the maximum legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) for driving from .08 down to .06.
Almost one-half of all fatally injured drinking drivers have a BAC of .20 or over. That’s three and one-third times higher than the proposed maximum BAC. Supporters insist that the cut would be only a small step in the right direction. Activists have already begun pushing for reductions down to .04 and .02. 17
INDIANA
It's illegal in Indiana for liquor stores to sell milk or cold soft drinks. They can, however, sell unrefrigerated soft drinks. 18
IOWA
Iowa has it’s share of temperance-oriented laws, of which here is a sample:
•It’s illegal to run a “tab.” 19
•If a law enforcement officer is having a drink in a bar in Iowa and an employee pours water down the drain, the water is legally considered an alcohol beverage intended for unlawful purposes. 20
•It’s no easier after work. An owner or employee of an establishment in Iowa that sells alcohol can't even legally consume a drink there after closing for business. 21
KANSAS
An Attorney General of Kansas issued the legal opinion that drinking on an airliner was forbidden by state law while the plane was in airspace over "dry" Kansas. He said that "Kansas goes all the way up and all the way down," His opinion was widely ridiculed in legal circles 22 but would probably have been hailed by Carrie Nation, who started her hatchet attacks against bars in Kansas.
KENTUCKY
Bourbon takes its name from Bourbon County in Kentucky, where it was first produced in 1789 by a Baptist minister. 23 Nevertheless, a person can be sent to jail for five years for merely sending a bottle of beer, wine or spirits as a gift to a friend in Kentucky. 24 Yes, even if it’s a bottle of bourbon.
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LOUISIANA
Louisiana law prohibits bars and restaurants from displaying any alcohol beverage brand name that can be seen from outside the establishment. 25
MAINE
A bill has been introduced to reduce Maine’s illegal threshold for driving down to .04, which is one-half the current level.
The average BAC of drivers involved in fatal crashes in Maine is .18%. That’s four and a half times higher than the proposed limit. 26
MARYLAND
Maryland now requires that alcohol beverage writers be certified as experts by an agency of the state before they can receive product samples, which it limits to three bottles per brand. 27
MASSACHUSETS
The Pilgrims landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, rather than continue sailing because they were running out of supplies, especially alcohol beverage. 28 Later, a brewery was one of Harvard College's first construction projects so that a steady supply of beer could be served in the student dining halls. 29
MICHIGAN
It's illegal in Michigan for a person under the age of 21 to give a gift of alcohol beverage to anyone, even to a person of legal age. 30
Permitting diners to take home an unfinished bottle of alcohol beverage, rather than consuming it all before leaving to prevent "waste," encourages moderation and discourages intoxication. However, this is strictly prohibited in Michigan. 31
MINNESOTA
Public intoxication is a crime in Pennsylvania but specifically not a crime in Minnesota. 32
MISSISSIPPI
Mississippi is uniquely temperance-oriented. It imposed state-wide alcohol prohibition in 1907, over a dozen years before the rest of the country. It was the very first state to ratify the 18th Amendment to create National Prohibition. Following national rejection of Prohibition through Repeal in 1933, the state maintained its own state-wide prohibition for another one-third of a century. After that, it specifically “reaffirmed prohibition” when it decided to permit local option regarding alcohol.
Today, almost one-half of the counties in Mississippi are "dry" with their own prohibition against the production, advertising, sale, distribution, or transportation of alcoholic beverages within their boundaries. It is even illegal to bring alcohol through a dry county in Mississippi while traveling across the country in the process of, for example, moving a personal wine or spirits collection to one's new residence. 33
MISSOURI
Anyone under the age of 21 who takes out household trash containing even a single empty alcohol beverage container can be charged with illegal possession of alcohol in Missouri. 34
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MONTANA
Judges doubt the legality of a new law in Montana that punishes parents if their offspring are charged with an alcohol offence. Supreme Court observers believe that courts can’t legally punish parents who have done nothing wrong and are innocent of any crime.
Prosecutors say the law may prompt legal challenge and litigation.
The law resembles an edict passed by the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, which similarly held parents responsible for the delinquent acts of their children. That law was abolished long ago. 35
NEBRASKA
Nebraska state law prohibits bars from selling beer unless they are simultaneously brewing a kettle of soup. 36
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Using alcohol in cooking is an essential part of being fully trained and prepared to enter the workforce as a professional chef. However, New Hampshire law prohibits alcoholic beverages from school grounds. Therefore, State Representative Jane Clemons sponsored a bill to enable culinary arts students to use alcoholic beverages in their cooking classes.
The proposed law would provide safeguards to ensure that the alcohol would not be used inappropriately and would be properly secured under lock and key when not in use for classes. It would also require parental notification that alcohol would be an ingredient permitted in cooking and baking classes.
The legislation failed. Earlier, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), had strongly objected to wine tasting being permitted in collegiate culinary classes, even though the beverage would not be swallowed. 37
NEW JERSEY
Princeton University officials confiscated T-shirts bearing slogans sympathetic to playing alcohol drinking games, in violation of students’ Constitutional rights to free speech.
“This is just censorship of speech, and the University, especially as an academic community that values academic freedom, should not be censoring speech,” said Dr. Andrew Appel, professor of computer science. “The confiscation of printed materials before they can be distributed constitutes prior restraint which is a very severe form of censorship” 5 He emphasized that “Prior restraint of a publication (the T-shirts) is really antithetical to the academic values of a university.” 38
NEW MEXICO
The Belden Tribune (NM) reports that alcohol sales to minors are a serious problem throughout the entire state of New Mexico. The editor of the paper declares that “the sheriff should wake up and catch one or two of these lawbreakers and have them hauled up before the court” to serve as examples to all others who are exploiting young people. He also urges parents to provide help to law enforcement authorities in identifying those who are providing alcohol to underage drinkers.
All of this is reported in issues of The Belden Tribune published in 1909. 39
NEW YORK
The longest recorded champagne cork flight was 177 feet and 9 inches, four feet from level ground at Woodbury Vineyards in New York State. 40
NORTH DAKOTA
State law of North Dakota prohibits serving beer and pretzels at the same time in any bar or restaurant. 42
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OHIO
Although the French wine, "Fat Bastard," is now distributed in states across the US., Ohio has banned its sale within their borders. 43 Not only does Ohio try to protect young and impressionable children who presumably never watch TV and don‘t have peers, but it also tries to protect its fish. State law prohibits getting a fish drunk. 44
OKLAHOMA
The University of Oklahoma now bans any consumption of alcohol in dorms and fraternity houses, even by students of legal age. “Is this going to stop people from drinking?“ asked a local police officer. “No. You are just displacing the problem somewhere else.” The well-intentioned policy has already driven much drinking off campus into uncontrolled locations.
There will probably be other unintended effects as well. A senior student pointed out that people will continue to drink but that the consequences would be different. She observed that “people used to trip and fall on their way home, now they’re going to smash into each other in their cars.”
The University‘s legal responsibility for protecting student safety extends beyond the campus. To the extent that the university shifts drinking off campus into uncontrolled environments it increases the dangers to students and also increases its exposure to legal liability.
Many colleges and universities prefer to provide safe drinking environments on campus where potential harm can be reduced and students can be more effectively protected. Many schools have also established social norms programs that reduce both the consumption and the abuse of alcohol. 45
PENNSYLVANIA
In Pennsylvania the tax on wine and spirits is called the Jamestown Flood tax because it was imposed in 1936 to raise funds to help the city of Jamestown rebuild and recover from a devastating flood that year. The city of Jamestown quickly rebuilt and recovered but the tax still continues. It currently costs the taxpayers of the state over $160,000,000.00 each year. 46
RHODE ISLAND
Rhode Island never ratified the 18 Amendment establishing Prohibition. 47
TENNESSEE
Some Tennessee state rules regulating alcohol advertising are violations of First Amendment free speech rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, according to a legal opinion issued by the Tennessee Attorney General’s office.
In spite of that official legal opinion, the state continues enforcing its apparently unconstitutional restrictions on free speech. 49
TEXAS
Of Texas' 254 counties, 79 are still completely dry seven decades after the Repeal of Prohibition. Many of the remaining counties are "moist" or partially dry. Some permit one form of alcohol beverage but not another, some prohibit on-premise consumption (except for private clubs), some permit (believe it or not) on-premise but no off-premise consumption, and some have other strange variations, often directly across the street from each other. 50
The county in Texas with the highest DWI arrests among young drivers is "dry;" that is, prohibits the sale of alcohol. 51
Texas state law prohibits taking more than three sips of beer at a time while standing. 52
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UTAH
Utah apparently ties with Mississippi for temperance laws. Here are some examples:
•Don’t swallow in Utah! Wine used in wine tastings in Utah must not be swallowed! 53
•There are no ordinary drinking establishments in Utah; full alcohol service is available only to dues-paying members of private social clubs or a limited number of restaurants that can't advertise, display, or mention the availability of alcohol beverages. 54
•It's illegal in Utah to advertise drink prices, alcohol brands, to show a "drinking scene," to promote happy hour, to advertise free food, or for restaurants to furnish alcohol beverage lists unless a customer specifically requests one. 55
VERMONT
Vermont is considering lowering the minimum legal drinking age to 18. The governor “agrees that if 18 is the age at which all citizens are bestowed full rights and privileges of American citizenship it ought to be the legal drinking age.”
However, the federal government threatens to deny the state nearly $10 million dollars annually if it grants its adults the right to drink alcoholic beverages. 56
VIRGINIA
George Washington was apparently the largest distiller of whiskey in the new American nation during the late 1700s. In 1798, the year before his death, Washington’s distillery at Mount Vernon produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey and produced a profit of $7,500. That was an enormous sum of money over 200 years ago. 57
WASHINGTON
A new state law now specifically prohibits alcohol breath test readings from being barred from court just because they might be invalid or incorrect. The law makes it easier to get questionable, possibly inaccurate, breath-test readings admitted into court. 58
Apparently, prosecutors want to increase their conviction rates, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the citizens suspected of driving while under the influence of alcohol.
WEST VIRGINIA
In West Virginia, bars can advertise alcohol beverage prices, but not brand names. 59
WISCONSIN
In Wisconsin, an adult under the age of 21 who is married to one age 21 or older can legally drink with his or her spouse.
アメリカの歴史でアジア人を含め他の人種も差別されてきたが、それでも人口に占める犯罪率は黒人に比べ、かなり低いことから、単に差別を理由に出来ない。（凡人）
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AnonymousNEW27
White cretin commits a horrible crime, it's just his fault. Black man commits a crime, it's Jesse's fault, along with Sharpton's, and an entire group of people. Folks like to trumpet that blacks, (while only 13% of the population) commit a higher percentage of crimes. What they omit from these discussions is that blacks have been discriminated against nearly 100% of the time throughout American history.
D SmithNEW26
NEWS FLASH!! what your clouded racist paranoia mind won't see is that EVERY HUMAN BEING IS DISCRIMINATED AGAINST...100% of the time.. For being fat, skinny, gay, disabled, foreign, short, tall, old, young, male, female, you name it! So get over yourself in thinking that the entire world is against you. The only problem here is that you are so busy accusing everyone else of being a pig you can't see what a pig you have become. Now give your mirror a high five because a 3 year old white boy was killed by his white father.
THE NYCEO 17 hours ago I continue to say this and I will never stop saying it. GUNS are the problem here. Yes, throwing leaves and eggs on someone's car is vandalism BUT if guns weren't involved here then this situation likely ends with everyone being alive. GUNS are the reason a retired policman murders a man who was texting in a theater. GUNS are the reason why Jordan Davis was murdered by Michael Dunn because he was in a car playing loud rap music. GUNS are the reason why a neighborhood watchmen in Florida had the courage to go chasing behind a stranger at night in a gated community and murders him. So yes, kids vandalizing a car is wrong but whatever happened to just calling the police and letting them handle it? GUNS, that's what happened.
Cobra 16 hours ago I will continue to say this and I will never stop saying it . . . guns are "NOT" the problem here. Your post makes it sound like this "GUN" just got up on its own, went outside and started blasting away.
Got news for you. The irresponsible person BEHIND that gun is responsible for what he did with that object! Just like the irresponsible people who get drunk and kill far more people with their vehicles than are killed with firearms, should be blamed for those deaths. Those CARS didn't just drive off by themselves drunk and run over people. The irresponsible people behind those wheels did that.
We need to focus on what is REALLY behind the problem . . . irresponsible PEOPLE in our society are the problem. Autos, knives, guns, etc. are the items used by KILLERS. Stop demonizing the objects and start demonizing the monsters behind them!
THE NYCEO 16 hours ago You don't have the intellect to understand this so let's just agree to disagree. Every time I post on this subject there is always at least one person like you who seems offended by it. So be it. One day you will up and see the larger issue here.
Older Wiser 15 hours ago Intellect? This man's life has been destroyed. He is being charged with a Terrorist Act? What about these 5 feral youths who were terrorizing him? It was 1AM and these people were out terrorizing their community and destroying property. So you even have a clue what the acid in a raw egg does to the paint on a car?
Markus Csak 14 hours ago Wow, aren't you a piece of work! Resorting to name calling because someone doesn't agree with your view? You are no more superior than Cobra, just because you feel you have a valid point. Debates are good, but not when it is reduced to 3rd grade name calling.
SuperWitty Smitty 15 hours ago When irresponsible people have access to a loaded gun: that's a BIG problem. No gun + no killing. When irresponsible drinkers want to drive, we stop them, because the car is what will kill. Same logic: the angry person gets a gun, the gun does the killing. Regulate guns (similar to how we regulate cars) and we will have fewer shootings. 2nd amendment my eye.
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KingChris 15 hours ago So smarty pants... how do we or the NRA stop irresponsible people from purchasing fire arms!? What do you propose!?
Cobra 14 hours ago The NHTSA has been pretty consistent in reporting over the last few years that out of the roughly 250 million cars in this nation, we consistently have about 30 thousand plus auto deaths per year. The FBI statistics consistently show that out of the roughly 300 million guns in this country we have FAR fewer gun deaths than with autos and those gun deaths are consistently going DOWN!
Here are the numbers for firearm deaths in America per year per our official FBI statistics:
You're entitled to your own opinions . . . but not your own facts. There are more guns and few deaths with them, than there are with autos. The numbers aren't even close. In the tragic case here, we simply have an irresponsible man far more than these particular objects. We are clearly far more irresponsible with our cars than we are with anything else and far more deaths result each year because of it.
Chris Crap 14 hours ago what if someone didn't have access to alcohol and drove after drinking at the juice bar instead...would they have killed the family of 4? Should we ban alcohol? What if football was banned too? would chad stover still be alive? Should we ban boating and swimming? i bet a lot of children die from drowning too. Swimming is NOT necessary to survive.
SuperWitty Smitty 12 hours ago Please note that we have many regulations for selling and using alcohol; possibly more regulations than we do for guns. Not sure which is involved in more deaths, but they surely go together, don't they?
Older Wiser 9 hours ago What if Mr. Noble had run out of his home and simply punched the girl in the head and killed her? He would have been using physical force to stop a felony being committed against him. Would he had been charged with murder?
SuperWitty Smitty 8 hours ago The reason guns are used in the majority of homicides (and suicides) is that they're so effective and efficient when it comes to killing. Punching, stabbing, choking all require a physical commitment and true desire to complete the task. A gun requires a momentary contraction of muscle, from a distance. No muss, no fuss, no chance to re-consider- BOOM and it's done.
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Number of U.S. millionaires hits a new record: study
The number of American households with a net worth of $1 million or more has reached 9.6 million, up 600,000 from 2012, according to Spectrem Group. The mega-wealthy, with $25 million or more in net worth, have also grown.
By Phyllis Furman / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, March 14, 2014, 8:30 PM
JIN LEE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
The number of American households with a net worth of $1 million or above has hit a new record, according to a study. The study also says 60% of investors with a net worth of $5 million or more plan to use their millions to invest in the stock market this year.
The rich keep getting richer — and now there are way more of them, too.
The number of American households with a net worth of $1 million or above has hit a new record: 9.6 million, a surge of more than 600,000 from 2012, according to a new study from Spectrem Group.
The previous high-water mark was 9.2 million in 2007. Total net worth does not include the value of a primary residence, according to Spectrem’s annual Affluent Market Insights Report.
Millionaires are making a comeback after seeing their ranks shrink to as low as 6.7 million in 2008 when the recession hit.
Since then, they’ve benefitted from a rebounding stock market and recovering real estate values.
“Most of the financial damage done by the recession has been erased by recent record-high markets in 2013 as well as a continued rebound in the real estate markets,” said George Walper Jr., president of Spectrem Group.
“In terms of the affluent investor, it’s fair to say they have finally recovered from the economic downturn.”
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Millionaires are on the rise again after seeing their ranks shrink to as low as 6.7 million in 2008 when the recession hit. All sectors of the rich are seeing their numbers grow.
Those with $5 million or more in net worth reached a record high of 1.24 million from 1.14 million in 2012.
There were just 840,000 who fit that bill in 2008.
The ranks of the mega-wealthy are also getting fatter: those with $25 million or more in net worth grew by 15,000 to 132,000 in 2013.
That’s way up from the 84,000 in this gilded class that were around back in 2008.
So how will they be spending their millions?
Sixty percent of investors with a net worth of $5 million or more intend to invest in the stock market this year, the study found.
More than 50% of the $5 million-plus club said they’re willing to invest outside the U.S., with an increased interest in investing in China.
<<White crimes vs Black crimes>> daily news comments
Martin Themartian 27 minutes ago
Chris Atkins, you apparently need a little schooling in the complex study of statistics. I understand, some people can only understand the most simple concepts in life, so don’t feel inferior due to your low intelligence.
“The White on White Crime rate is 92%”
The percentage is basically irrelevant. If one Eskimo killed another Eskimo, and that single murder accounted for all Eskimo murders that year, the Eskimo on Eskimo crime rate for murder would be 100%. That doesn’t mean that Eskimos, as a people, are a threat to other people or other Eskimos.
Now, the African American community murders at 6 times the rate of the white community. 6 times. The African American community is responsible for over 4000 murders a year. If they only murdered at the same rate as white folks, the African American community would only be responsible for 600 murders a year.
To put this into perspective, the African American community is so violent beyond the rate of every other race that approximately 3600 people are murdered each year. This is approximately the number of lives lost in 9/11.
As far as white folks committing crimes, other white folks don’t immediately cry “racism!!!” when they are caught by law enforcement. We don’t feel any solidarity. We are glad they are locked up.
“98% of all serial killers in the last 30 years have been White Males.”
Yes, no surprise. It takes some measure of intelligence and planning and self control to elude capture by the police while committing serial murders. African Americans have this strange habit of posting their crimes on social media.
“61% of all documented rapes are perpetrated by Whites.”
This should come as no surprise. The white population is 6 times that of the African American community, yet African Americans manage to rape the same number of women each year. Imagine if the population numbers were reversed. The United States would look like, well, the continent of Africa. (Silence. Crickets chirping.)
Bank robberies, the same as serial killers.
“92% of all documented cases of child molestation and incest occurs in the White population .
” The key word is documents. The white community actually knows who the fathers are, and cares about the welfare of all children, so we take these crimes seriously. Child molestation and incest in the African American community is so endemic that it is considered normal and not reported.
Glad I could fix that
for you.
joanne glenn 20 minutes ago
Excellent Martin, excellent work!!!! i couldn't come up with those stats but i knew the ratios were off when they (black people) say that white people blah blah blah. so thank you.
Chris Atkins 18 minutes ago
You white Devils just hate the truth..
Chris Atkins 8 minutes ago
Martin is an idiot and he does not have the intelligence to rebuttal any of the facts I put forth. Whites always throw out bogus stats, but hate when they are presented with cold hard facts.
Chris Atkins 17 minutes ago
The White Man stands guilty as charged!
Count 1: Invasion of America: Guilty
Count 2: Killing the American Indians: Guilty
Count 3: Enslaving Blacks: Guilty
Count 4: Destroying the Ozone layer: Guilty
Count 5: The biggest Murderer throughout history: Guilty
Count 6: The Biggest Rapist throughout history: Guilty
Count 7: The Greatest Child Molester: Guilty
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Chris Atkins 16 minutes ago
Most of the murders taking place in major cities are gang related. It has nothing to do with race. Gang related crime has been a problem going all the way back to the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's. During those times the gangs were Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, etc. The murder rate among these gangs was very high. In fact, the White gangs during those eras invented the whole concept of drive by shootings. The gangs of the past focused on robberies and burglaries. Today, most of the gangs are Black and Hispanic. They focus more on drug dealing and gun running as a way to finance their crime enterprise. However, instead of isolating the gang menace, the mainstream media focuses on all black males as the face of crime. Additionally, today's Gang culture is used to feed the multi billion dollar Beast known as the PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX by producing a steady stream of 1st time and repeat offenders. Hence, there is no real effort to try to eradicate the gangs because many people are getting paid as a result of their existence.Reply 0
Chris Atkins 13 minutes ago
If we are going to talk about crime per capita, then consider the fact that Whites make up just 20% of the population of the world but they have committed 85% of the worst atrocities against humanity throughout history. FACT! History proves that 20% of the world's population, the so called Whites, have committed the most violent, murderous and heinous acts throughout history. This cannot be denied or refuted! Whites have even brought the entire world to the brink of destruction with their weapons of mass destruction. Another Fact! From slavery to Genocide, Whites have proven to be the most violent. 20 million whites killed by other whites under Stalin and Nazi Germany was White on White Crime. In America, the White on White crime rate is 92%.. 94% of all documented cases of child molestation and incest occurs in the White population. This is a Fact! It is an epidemic. They butchered the Native Americans, Enslaved The Blacks and Then Built Churches on Stolen Land and proclaimed "In God We Trust." Sadly, America was built on violence. America's foundation is violence. America glorifies gangsterism and gangsters like Jesse James, John Gotti, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Dutch Shultz, Bugsy Siegel, John Dillenger, Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly etc, The end result are men like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, James Holmes and many more. But America degrades Gangsta Rap. That's hypocritical. Even the Kennedy's made their fortune from Bootlegging and violence. And some of the other Robber Barons did as well.
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日本のヒーローの象徴はなんといっても赤穂浪士の忠誠。アメリカのHeroは正義と権力の糾弾にある。それによって大衆の被害者救済にある。なるほど民主的である。忠誠よりも正義が勝つということだ。
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Whistleblower who caused $9 billion JP Morgan fine speaks out for first time
'I could lose everything,' said Alayne Fleischmann, a former transaction manager and attorney at the firm. 'But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.'
BY Marc Weinreich / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS / Published: Friday, November 7, 2014, 10:33 AM / Updated: Friday, November 7, 2014, 11:05 AMA.
Canadian-raised Alayne Fleischmann spent two years at JP Morgan and revealed the innerworkins of the bank to federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Her details led to the firm paying out one of the largest fines in U.S. history.=pic(LinkedIn)
The Cornell Law grad who caused JP Morgan to pay out $9 billion last year — one of the largest fines in U.S. history — spoke this week about what led her to blow the whistle in 2008 and reveal what she said was “massive criminal securities fraud” to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Alayne Fleischmann, the Canadian-raised attorney at the bank, talked to Rolling Stone about how she tried to warn her managers about the fundamental dangers in re-selling sub-prime mortgages without at least warning investors about the inherent risks attached to making such investments.
‘You can't securitize these loans without special disclosure about what's wrong with them," Fleischmann recalled telling a managing director at the bank. "And if you make that disclosure, no one will buy them."
Fleischmann, who started out as a transaction manager at the bank, said that people at the firm assumed that she wouldn’t speak to friends, family or the media about what she saw during her two years there.
They were right, but only for so long.
She didn’t say a word because she had signed a non-disclosure agreement when she left the firm six years ago. Like anything, however, there was fine print, and she felt that she was allowed to talk to federal prosecutors because of her role as the central witness to potential criminal activity.
“The assumption they make is that I won't blow up my life to do it,” she said. “But they're wrong about that.'
Jamie Dimon remains CEO of JP Morgan Chase after leading the firm during now-proven criminal activity.=pic(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
