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Source: http://yoyo.youthactiv8.org/activity/p/12456/
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Saturday, 24 December 2011
Gingrich, Clinton had stormy partnership (AP)
WASHINGTON ? To hear Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich tell it, he and Democratic President Bill Clinton were political partners in the 1990s, lowering unemployment, balancing the federal budget and keeping the nation's economy in robust health.
"I worked with President Clinton ... and we ended up with about 11 million new jobs in a four-year period, went down to 4.2 percent unemployment," Gingrich said in a recent debate, suggesting that as president, he could do it again.
In fact, the economy wasn't as rosy as he's claiming during his time in leadership. And the Clinton-Gingrich relationship was marked by intense cycles of warfare and courtship. The major economic boost while they were both in power, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, was the product of compromise that enraged their respective political bases. And it inspired this pair of outsized personalities to huddle over secret plans for a centrist coalition to help them step around the purists on Social Security and Medicare reform. Only the House's impeachment proceedings against Clinton blew those plans apart.
"I like the guy so much I want to do a deal with him," Gingrich, then the House speaker, confessed to his outraged lieutenants during a government shutdown almost exactly 16 years ago, according to a book about the stormy Clinton-Gingrich partnership.
"I respect his ability to think and do," Clinton said of Gingrich this week on Fox News Channel. "And I eventually hammered out a really productive relationship with him."
At the brink of the 2012 election year, Gingrich is in strong contention for the Republican presidential nomination and is casting himself as the most electable candidate in the GOP field against Democratic President Barack Obama. He cites his two decades in the House, four years as speaker and knowledge of history as ample preparation for helping the economy recover from recession.
As he has all year, Gingrich is hitching his presidential hopes to the relatively healthy economy of the 1990s.
"For four years, we balanced the budget and paid off $405 billion in debt," Gingrich said in May as he kicked off his campaign. "We've done it before. We can do it again."
Sometimes, he mentions Clinton.
During a debate earlier this month, Gingrich cited his work with Clinton, the 11 million jobs created and the low unemployment figure of 4.2 percent. When Gingrich became speaker in January 1995, the unemployment rate was 5.7 percent. When he left office four years later, the rate was 4.3 percent.
Other times, he leaves out Clinton ? even though presidents have the highest-profile role in economic policy and therefore get most of the credit or blame for what happens on their watch.
"When I was speaker, our budget was balanced and 11 million jobs were created," Gingrich says in a campaign ad released this week.
Still, Gingrich's version is a potent message for an angry electorate this holiday season, as Americans struggle to get or keep jobs, pay their holiday bills and hang onto whatever trust they still have in government leaders who have spent the year making big decisions only under threat of catastrophe.
Gingrich did contribute to the economy of the 1990s, according to an account of the Clinton-Gingrich talks of 1996-98, which resulted in a balanced budget act ? and more.
"It's a fair claim for him to make," says Steven M. Gillon, who won Clinton and Gingrich's cooperation for his 2008 book, "The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation." For a "very fertile period ... they worked behind the scenes crafting significant legislation that had a positive impact on the economy. And they were doing so at great risk."
"Conservatives didn't trust him," recalled John Feehery, an aide at the time to House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who chaperoned Gingrich to meetings with the president to keep them from making deals. Throughout the four years Clinton's aides, too, maneuvered to keep the president and House speaker from being alone together, according to Gillon's book.
As part of the 1997 balanced budget deal, Gingrich agreed to a proposal to give block grants to states to pay for health care for uninsured children who didn't qualify for Medicaid. The deal forced Republicans to swallow a major new entitlement, the largest expansion of taxpayer-financed health insurance coverage for children since Medicaid began in the 1960s.
Many Republicans saw the State Children's Health Insurance Program as too much government involvement in private industry and a step toward the mandated health insurance championed by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Gingrich not only supported the idea, he backed SCHIP's reauthorization in 2007.
The budget deal marked a change in the pair's relationship from the days after the 1994 Republican "revolution" that made Gingrich speaker ? and the two government shutdowns the following year. By striking the massive budget act, "They realized they could accomplish more by working together, even if that meant abandoning the liberal and conservative wings of their respective parties," Gillon writes.
Gingrich and Clinton tried to do even more together, convening a secret meeting on Oct. 28, 1997, in the Treaty Room of the White House on revamping Social Security and Medicare ? for which centrists would be the key to passage, Gillon wrote. The plan was for Clinton to propose reforming entitlements in his State of the Union speech, while Gingrich would respond with supportive words. But a week before the president's annual speech to the nation, the story broke about Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
"I knew it was over," Gingrich reflected of his partnership with Clinton, according to the book. Under fire from conservatives after his own lieutenants tried to overthrow him, Gingrich left Congress in January 1999. The House impeached Clinton on charges connected to his testimony about an affair, but the Senate acquitted him.
Fast-forward a dozen years, and Gingrich is casting his role in the 1990s economy his way.
"This country has enormous potential ... to balance the budget, as we did for four years when I was speaker," Gingrich said on Fox News.
In fact, the national debt went up, not down, during the four years Gingrich was speaker. In January 1995, when he assumed the leadership position, the gross national debt was $4.8 trillion. When he left four years later, it was $5.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion.
As for annual deficits, he did not preside over a four-year period of balanced budgets. In the 1996 and 1997 budget years, the first two years he influenced as speaker, the government ran deficits. In 1998 and 1999, the government ran surpluses.
Washington achieved surpluses for two years after that, making four consecutive years of black ink. But Gingrich only had a hand in the first two.
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Friday, 23 December 2011
Dylan Armstrong: The best Athletics Canada has to offer
Published: December 21, 2011 5:00 PM
Updated: December 21, 2011 5:21 PM
Dylan Armstrong had a year to remember.
The Kamloops shot-put master won three Athletics Canada awards, the organization announced on Wednesday, Dec. 21.
He won the Jack W. Davies Trophy, for overall athlete of the year, the F.N.A. Rowell Trophy, for outstanding athlete in field events, and the Cal D. Bricker Memorial Trophy, for most outstanding performance.
Armstrong won Canada's first-ever medal in a throwing event at the IAAF world championships, earning a silver in?Daegu, South Korea.
The hulking athlete won Pan American Games gold in Brazil in October, setting a Games record in the process, and he won the Diamond League title, which came with it a 4-carat diamond trophy and a cool $40,000.
And, oh yeah, the Westsyde secondary graduate set a Canadian record with a throw of 22.21 metres, the longest throw recorded on the planet this year.
Much of Armstong's success can be attributed to his coach, Anatoliy Bondarchuk, lead coach at the National Throws Centre in the River City.
Bondarchuk was named Athletics Canada's coach of the year.
?
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Source: http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/sports/136038223.html
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Toasty planets circle stellar heart
Roasted remains orbit former red giant
Web edition : Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
It?s rude to play with your food, even if you?re a star.
One of the stars in the Kepler space telescope?s crosshairs has apparently regurgitated the Earth-sized remains of two planets ingested when the star temporarily ballooned into a red giant. Now, the rocky survivors are whizzing around the star?s small, pulsing heart, each completing its orbit in less than 10 hours.
At least, that?s the interpretation offered by an international team thatreports the oddball planetary system in the Dec. 22 Nature. While some astronomers are skeptical of the explanation, if the story holds up it could explain how a rare type of star forms and foreshadow the fates of enormous planets engulfed by their hosts.
?The idea that a planet could survive while being immersed in a star is pretty spectacular,? says Eliza Kempton, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. ?It?s a really interesting discovery if it does pan out.?
The star is a rare beast, a hot B subdwarf, and the two roasted planets ? KOI 55.01 and 55.02 ? are the purported cores of partially digested planets that started off larger than Jupiter and are now just toasty crisps a bit smaller than Earth. They?re squished right next to the star, orbiting at less than 1 percent the distance between Earth and the sun.
Normally, a star like the sun evolves into a red giant, then collapses into a white dwarf. But sometimes, the giant sheds its stellar skin before contracting, leaving behind a bright, beating heart ? the hot B subdwarf. Scientists don?t know what provokes some red giants to molt, but hypothesize that a companion ? whether it?s a second star or a planet ? might instigate the transformation. A culprit planet would need to be at least several times as large as Jupiter, large enough to leave behind the surviving remnants, says astrophysicist and study coauthor Stephane Charpinet of the University of Toulouse in France. ?
To spy the tenacious travelers, scientists monitored enigmatic signals muddying the star?s normal pulsations. Like bells, stars vibrate and ring at certain tones. This one, called KIC 05807616, had several subtle tones that couldn?t be explained by the star alone, Charpinet says. He and the team ruled out other explanations such as star spots or a stellar companion before deciding that planets were the most likely culprits of the star?s abnormal jingles.
But some scientists are skeptical about the team?s interpretation, pointing to a number of assumptions the team used to calculate the size and properties of the proposed planets and the need for additional observations of other similar stars.
?I?m not convinced,? says astronomer John Johnson of Caltech. ?This doesn?t have to be wrong, but I have my doubts.?
Planets have been discovered in inhospitable locations before. The first extrasolar planet to be discovered was found orbiting a pulsar, the dense, rapidly spinning remains of a star that has gone supernova.? Planet remains have also been found in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. And on December 19, scientists reported on arXiv.org the discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a binary star system that included the same type of hot B subdwarf.
Found in: Astronomy
Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337072/title/Toasty_planets_circle_stellar_heart
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Wednesday, 7 December 2011
100,000 Wreaths Headed To Arlington National Cemetery
PORTLAND, Maine -- Twenty years ago, wreath company owner Morrill Worcester and a dozen other people laid 5,000 wreaths on headstones at Arlington National Cemetery. It was Worcester's way of giving thanks to the nation's veterans with leftover unsold wreaths.
This year, Worcester has arranged for up to 100,000 wreaths to be placed on gravesites at the military cemetery Dec. 10 in his biggest wreath-laying undertaking yet.
A convoy of more than 20 trucks left Worcester Wreath Co. in the eastern Maine town of Harrington on Sunday to begin the six-day journey to the cemetery in Arlington, Va., outside Washington, the final resting place for hundreds of thousands of veterans and a tourist site that draws 4 million visitors a year. Along the way, there'll be ceremonies at schools, veterans' homes and in communities in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.
Worcester never expected the wreath-laying effort to grow from a single tractor-trailer carrying a few thousand wreaths to 84 big rigs delivering wreaths to Arlington and hundreds of locations. Besides the Arlington ceremony, his Wreaths Across America organization has also organized more than 700 other ceremonies at veterans' cemeteries and monuments across the country and overseas involving 225,000 wreaths.
"We haven't really tried to push it; it's really just grown on its own," Worcester said. "We have a hard time keeping up with it."
Worcester, who has never served in the military, came up with the idea of a wreath-laying ceremony 20 years ago when he found himself with an extra 5,000 wreaths in December, too late to bring to market. He decided upon Arlington National Cemetery, which he had visited as a child.
After that first year, Worcester continued donating wreaths and holding ceremonies at the cemetery. The event remained relatively small with little fanfare until a photo, showing thousands of green wreaths with red ribbons nestled against headstone on a snow-covered ground, made its way around the Internet about five years ago.
After that, Worcester got thousands of emails and letters from people wanting to donate, and inquiries from others asking how they could hold wreath-laying ceremonies of their own to pay tribute to those who have served in the military. So he and his wife founded the nonprofit Wreaths Across America to take in donations and organize hundreds of wreath-laying ceremonies at veterans' cemeteries.
Wreaths Across America put 24,000 wreaths on Arlington headstones last year, and initially hoped to put them on virtually all 220,000 headstones this year. That initiative fell short, but Worcester said he's still pleased that they'll be able to put out 100,000 of the laurels.
Of the 325,000 wreaths in all of this year's ceremonies, Worcester is donating 25,000. His company makes the rest, but they are paid for through donations from groups and individuals and through corporate sponsorships.
The growth of the event doesn't surprise Joanne Patton of Hamilton, Mass., the daughter-in-law of World War II Gen. George S. Patton and the widow of Patton's son, Maj. Gen. George S. Patton IV, who is buried in Arlington.
On Monday, Patton will receive one of Worcester's wreaths in a ceremony in Topsfield, Mass., which she will then lay on a tank in Patton Park in Hamilton, Mass. She has participated in past Wreaths Across America events as well.
"It's an amazing expression of honoring the spirit of service," she said.
Figuring out the logistics of resting so many wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery was complex enough when there were only 5,000 to worry about, said Wayne Hanson, who is in charge of coordinating the ceremony at Arlington. If the weather is nice, Hanson expects more than 10,000 people to participate in Saturday's event.
Hanson is optimistic that some year soon all the Arlington headstones will have wreaths placed on them for the ceremony.
"We can work toward doing the whole cemetery for our 25th anniversary," he said.
___
RELATED VIDEO: Obama Lays Wreath At Arlington National Cemetery '; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/04/arlington-national-cemetery-wreaths_n_1128190.html
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Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Encourage Children to Earn Money for Digital Items Through Entrepreneurial Actions [Parent Hacks]
Personal finance weblog Man Vs. Debt author Adam Baker's young daughter wanted to buy extra virtual tokens for a kiddie-MMO, Baker responded by asking what she think she could do to earn a little extra spending money. Turns out the kid loves to make paintings and her dad and her worked out a plan to sell several of her paintings to relatives at six quarters each. The girl painted five or six paintings, an activity she enjoys, and sold all of her paintings to relatives who were eager to add her work to their refrigerator.
Whether it's a lemonade stand, cookies, or even finger paintings, encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit in your children will teach them about the work that goes into earning money and they may even decide not to spend their hard-won quarters on frivolous downloads. Baker's daughter has yet to spend the quarters she earned painting.
Raising Entrepreneurial Kids | Man Vs. Debt
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