Laser treatments for acne have become more popular in recent years, but many people are not able to take advantage of them for any number of reasons. The good news is that there is another possible treatment. With IPL acne scars can be reduced or completely eliminated. IPL is short for Intense Pulse Light and [...]
Retin A is used in the treatment of many different skin problems including common acne. It can help improve the texture of the skin and correct problems with discoloration too. When it comes to Retin A acne scars may be reduced in two ways. The following information will show you how Retin A is used, [...]
NBC's Tom Costello made a gaffe of planetary proportions on Saturday's Nightly News as he reported on the launch of NASA's latest Martian rover. The correspondent identified the rocket, which blasted the unmanned Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) probe into space for its eight month-plus journey to the fourth planet, as a "Saturn V." This is actually the name of the rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The last Saturn V flew in 1973.
The expendable rocket that actually blasted off on Saturday morning, taking MSL and its Curiosity rover beyond the Earth's atmosphere, is the Atlas V. It is the newest member of a rocket family that has been in service since the 1950s. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 after a modified first-generation Atlas launched his Mercury capsule into space.
Later in his report (video available here), Costello stated that "just traveling the 154 million miles to the Red Planet will take more than eight months." According to NASA's press kit for the Mars mission, this will be the distance between Earth and Mars when MSL reaches its destination in August 2012. However, the probe's total travel distance will actually be 354 million miles, more than twice the figure the NBC correspondent cited.
I actually had saw the Atlas V booster that launched MSL into space back in August 2011, when NASA invited me to attend the launch of the Juno probe, which will orbit the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter (which also launched on top of an Atlas V rocket). As part of their NASA Tweetup outreach program with the public, the space agency gave an extensive tour of the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, including the facility which prepares the rocket for launch. The booster sat on its side inside a hangar until it was taken to a vertical integration facility near the launch pad, where a Centaur upper stage was stacked on top of it, along with the probe. (see photo above)
The full transcript of Tom Costello's report from Saturday's NBC Nightly News:
LESTER HOLT: The folks at NASA are calling it the monster truck of Mars, and tonight, the world's biggest extraterrestrial explorer is on its way to the Red Planet. For NASA, this new mission in search of life carries high hopes and high risks.
NBC's Tom Costello has our report.
GEORGE DILLER, NASA: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1-
TOM COSTELLO (voice-over): With a Saturn V [sic] liftoff at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA has launched its most sophisticated and ambitious mission to Mars yet. Just traveling the 154 million miles to the Red Planet will take more than eight months. Then, next August, a high-risk landing, as a supersonic parachute slows the science lab's descent to Mars. Sixty feet above the planet, a sky crane will gently lower the rover, named Curiosity, onto the Martian surface, leaving Curiosity on its own to begin looking for signs of life, past or present.
PAMELA CONRAD, ASTROBIOLOGIST: Do we anticipate that we'll learn a whole lot about Mars? Absolutely. Do we know what specifically that will be? No clue.
COSTELLO: Curiosity is a six-wheeled rover, standing more than six feet tall, able to drive long distances under a hot Martian sun, analyzing rock and soil samples and then, transmitting those findings back to Earth.
COSTELLO (on-camera): NASA has carefully selected the landing zone on Mars in the Gale Crater, where a huge mountain rises right out of the crater floor. Scientists believe they see layers of sedimentary deposit here that they hope will help them understand more about Mars history, but also, what happened to the lakes and rivers.
BRIAN HYNEK, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO: This is Gale Crater-
COSTELLO (voice-over): Brian Hynek is a planetary science professor and Mars expert at the University of Colorado. The evidence he says now seems clear that Mars once had a very warm and wet environment.
HYNEK: Microbial life could have persisted for hundreds of millions of years on ancient Mars- and perhaps, even today.
COSTELLO: And that possibility poses a big problem. NASA has gone to great lengths to ensure Curiosity doesn't carry any Earth germs that could contaminate life on Mars. High resolution cameras have already detected what appear to be large ice sheets buried under the Martian surface. Curiosity's mission- to determine whether life is or ever was buried there, too. Tom Costello, NBC News, Washington.
[H/t: @LaunchPhoto on Twitter.]
An Emmy and Grammy Award-winning composer who has written songs for PBS's Sesame Street as well as the Disney Channel was arrested for child pornography Monday.
The Charleston Post and Courier shockingly reported Tuesday:
A man who composed music for "Sesame Street" and the Disney Channel and who started a jazz program for students at Porter-Gaud School appeared in federal court Monday, accused of making and sending child pornography. [...]
[Fernando] Rivas' resume lists ties to Gloria Estefan, Cyndi Lauper, Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. In 2006, Disney hired him to compose the music for "Handy Manny," a children's animated TV program about a bilingual handyman and his talking tools.
The accusations against him stem from someone else's arrest in New Jersey on charges of possession of child pornography, according to a North Charleston police report. Local officers helped FBI agents with a search warrant of Rivas' home on Falling Embers Lane on April 19.
There, according to court records, investigators found photographs of a 4-year-old girl naked and "restrained in handcuffs and other bondage-type devices." Records from that search say investigators read Rivas his rights and that he admitted to taking the photographs and using handcuffs to restrain the girl.
The records say Rivas also admitted to sending the pictures to two other people by email.
Adding insult to injury, New York's Daily News reported Tuesday Rivas won a Grammy in 1998 for Best Children's Album. He's also won two Emmys.
What the heck is going on in America?
(H/T Matthew Balan)
The public obviously aren't as gaga for Lady Gaga as the media are.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the 38-year-old A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on Thursday night garnered more viewers than the brand new A Very Gaga Thanksgiving:
All the Thanksgiving specials Thursday night couldn’t hold a candle to a repeat of the CBS comedy [Big Bang Theory], which delivered 11.2 million viewers and a 3.6 adult demo rating. Compare that to ABC’s Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (5.8 million, 1.8) and A Very Gaga Thanksgiving (5.4 million, 1.6).
So Gaga got beat by two reruns.
Now THAT's entertainment.
(H/T Big Hollywood)
It seems that everyone in Washington believes that there is zero chance of any kind of economic calamity befalling this nation until January 2013, even though the government is on track to stay on self-destructive autopilot until then. I do not understand how or why anyone can be that confident.
Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, almost gleefully participated in that denial on Thursday in presenting the following paragraphs (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Beginning in 2013, the federal government faces two oncoming trains. When the supercommittee was unable to find agreement by Wednesday, it triggered spending cuts of $1.2 trillion starting in January 2013 and extending over 10 years. Half of the cuts would come from defense spending, the other from education, agriculture and environmental programs, and, to a lesser extent, Medicare.
At the same time, tax cuts adopted during the presidency of George W. Bush will expire at the end of 2012, meaning an increase for every taxpayer.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the cuts would "tear a seam in the nation's defense."
Meanwhile, the tax increases would hit a still-fragile economy, endangering a recovery and raising prospects of another recession.
Kuhnhenn pretends that the two jumbo-sized locomotives which are chugging merrily along and continually building up steam right now, namely the national debt and the nation's budget deficit, aren't even there. The word "debt" appears only once in his report, but only in reference to the "debt crisis this summer" without saying how big the debt is. While the word "deficit" frequently appears, the AP reporter never tells readers what Uncle Sam's reported deficits have been ($4 trillion during the last three fiscal years) or what they're projected to be, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Page XI at link; $973 billion in fiscal 2012, and a combined $3.7 trillion — in my view, a very unrealistically low figure — in the nine years which follow).
The national debt train is over $15 trillion and has been growing at a rate of at least $1.5 trillion per year. As noted, the CBO projects that the deficit train will accumulate $4.7 trillion in shortfalls over the next ten years.
But Kuhnhenn, like almost everyone else in Washington, appears to only want to talk about politics, coming down on the side of effectively complimenting President Obama for his noninvolvement. Really:
While Republicans have criticized Obama for not engaging directly in the supercommittee negotiations, his hands-off approach was calculated, coming in the aftermath of his own failed attempts to strike a deficit deal with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. In a gridlocked Congress, Obama is more likely to lose if he gets deeply involved.
The detachment allows him to set a clear dividing line for voters, one in which he can cast Republicans as protecting the rich. It's a stance that for now has political appeal. A number of recent public opinion polls show that up to two-thirds of Americans support raising taxes on individuals earning more than $1 million, and about half favor raising taxes on families earning at least $250,000 a year.
Even if some Republicans were disposed to negotiate a new deficit-reduction plan, Obama's sharpening of the lines between the parties could drive them away.
"If the president has decided that he is now in full campaign mode, that's going to make things very difficult in terms of finding common ground," said David Winston, a GOP strategist who advises House Republican leaders.
As I've noted and others have stated, the president and his team are deliberately endangering the country's ability to survive its next 14 months solely in the name of achieving his reelection. That's the real news, Jim — and shame on you for trying to make the unacceptable palatable by pretending we're not in trouble in the here and now.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
If you had the misfortune of watching Weekends with Alex Witt on MSNBC Saturday morning, you sadly were treated to four minutes of propaganda about how we Americans just don’t pay enough taxes – period!
CQ Roll Call’s David Hawkings was invited on to misinform the gullible about Americans’ tax rates being too low, corporations shirking their tax responsibilities, the poor paying more than conservatives contend, and, of course, the rich not paying their “fair share” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
“If you take all the taxes paid in the United States and you compared them against other countries, the U.S. overall taxes are the lowest as a percentage of the economy among developing countries,” said Hawkings. “About one out of every four dollars in the whole economy is paid in taxes. That’s lower than any other country in the developed world. In Denmark it’s as high as about 50 percent.”
I realize this might seem like an odd question, but what is the goal of a capitalist system? Is it for the citizens to pay the highest taxes possible or for them to build their own wealth?
If the goal is the former, I’d suggest even Denmark is failing: why stop at 50 percent?
But here in America, which was founded by former British citizens escaping the King’s confiscatory taxes, we have historically strived for the tax burden to be as low as possible, even as low as zero during peacetime.
Yet Hawkings seemed a bit confused about our tax history saying, “If you compare the U.S. taxes now to where they have been historically, lower than almost any year in recent memory. The income tax has been around for about a hundred years. For about half that time the tax rate has been higher than it is now for the top earners.”
Well, that means that half of those roughly 100 years, the tax rate for top earners has been lower. Now add the 100-plus years prior to that and taxes on the most successful are now actually higher than they’ve historically been.
Not surprisingly, such logic escaped Hawkings and Witt.
When the subject of what America’s poor pay in taxes surfaced, Hawkings said, “Conservatives point out that in fact as many as half of Americans in the last year paid no income taxes, no traditional IRS income taxes. But let’s remember that nine percent were unemployed, some are elderly and disabled, and almost all the rest of them pay those payroll tax deductions that we see in our paychecks that come out for Medicare and Social Security.”
Yes, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2006, the bottom quintile in the nation paid just 0.8 percent of all federal taxes collected including income, payroll, excise, and corporate.
That’s right: the poorest 20 percent paid only 0.8 percent.
By contrast: the richest 20 percent paid 69.3 percent; the richest ten percent paid 55.4 percent; the richest 5 percent paid 44.7 percent, and; the richest one percent paid 28.3 percent.
Maybe more importantly, as can be plainly seen from the following CBO chart, what the poor have been paying has been declining since 1979 while what the upper-earners have contributed has steadily risen:
Not surprisingly, neither Hawkings nor Witt brought this up either.
But what did surface, of course, was the fiction that the rich just aren’t paying their “fair share.”
“Historically, the top one percent of Americans pay a big chunk of the taxes,” said Hawkings. “Conservatives say in fact they pay about a quarter of the taxes, but they make 40 percent of the money. That much is true, but again, like we were talking about a minute ago with the corporations, the rich have an enormous advantage in terms of their deductions. They can deduct their capital gains taxes, they can deduct charitable donations. They have a better job with their accountants and in some cases their own lobbyists keeping their tax rate low.”
Maybe so, but what Hawkings dishonestly ignored is that with all that, the rich still pay more as a percent of both taxable and adjusted gross income than lower wage earners.
The IRS tables for 2009 show folks making $200,000 or more paid between 26.3 and 28.6 percent of their taxable incomes. By contrast, those making less than $200,000 paid between 17.8 and 22.1 percent.
As such, the progressive nature of our tax code – meaning folks that make more pay more – is still quite intact in America despite the carping and whining of liberals about the rich not paying their “fair share.”
If only it were required that actual real tax percentages reported by CBO and the IRS be included in such discussions.
It would make it much more difficult for the Left to continually propagandize the nation about who is and who isn’t paying taxes.
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and NPR's Nina Totenberg had a humorous exchange on PBS's Inside Washington Friday.
After mocking Totenberg for the "surprise" of her giving Democrats on the Super Committee credit, Krauthammer scolded her for constantly interrupting him saying, "I'm in the middle of a sentence, and I am going to get to the end, and I will let you know with punctuation, alright?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
GORDON PETERSON, HOST: Well, were there any white hats anywhere in this adventure?
NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: Well, I actually give the Democrats some credit for moving off the dime a bit, but the lack of trust and the lack of ability to have a corresponding move. The tragedy here is that this was a system that may have been doomed to failure, but it also could have been doomed to success because it guaranteed a vote on the floor. It circumvented the need to get 3/5 vote to kill a filibuster. And it would have, if they could have come to an agreement, it would have gotten an up or down vote.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: What a surprise that Nina should have found that the Democrats deserve some credit on this committee. I'm really shocked to hear that. The fact is that despite all the protestations of the Democrats, the Republicans, starting with the very conservative Senator Coburn, who was on Simpson-Bowles, and who approved and supported an increase in net tax rates…
TOTENBERG: That was the Gang of Six, though.
KRAUTHAMMER: No, this was in, he voted in Simpson-Bowles to increase by $1 trillion…
TOTENBERG: Yeah, that’s not the Super Committee.
PETERSON: Let him finish.
KRAUTHAMMER: I'm in the middle of a sentence…
TOTENBERG: Yes you are.
KRAUTHAMMER: …and I am going to get to the end, and I will let you know with punctuation, alright?
TOTENBERG: Okay.
KRAUTHAMMER: Comma…
TOTENBERG: [Laughter]
KRAUTHAMMER: …he supported a $1 trillion increase in net tax revenues in the same way that on the Super Committee Senator Toomey of the Club for Growth supported an increase in tax revenues. It seems to me that the myth that Republicans oppose higher taxes is simply not recognizing there is a difference between lowering rates and increasing revenues. That’s been the problem.
Despite the humor, Krauthammer was quite right. The issue is revenues not tax rates, something that folks like Totenberg can't get their hands around because of their ignorance of budgets.
Sadly, that's an intellectual handicap suffered by most liberal media members who don't understand that you can raise revenues without raising marginal tax rates.
Maybe if they'd grasp this, Democrats on these committees would be forced to as well.
Or is that asking too much of so-called journalists?
Speak out.
So many great sporting events this weekend who knows what to watch?
