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President Obama, 'It wasnt me'...

• Government Shutdown: "Washington needs to get out of the habit of governing by crisis" , blame Washington
• Weak employment number s, Blame Congress , forget the fact that the democrats have 40 job creation bills they haven't acted on.
• The Economy is sluggish , blame the Europe..
• Structural Problems are preventing economic growth: its the ATM Machines in airport Kiosks
• Businesses have lost their edge causing slow job growth, blame the American Businesses , forget tax hikes and regulations imposed by the administration
• US Economy is slow and jobs are not on the rise, blame High Energy Prices lets not talk about opposition to the American Energy Initiative, Shutting down Coal Production. After all Nuclear Power is the way to go... just ask Japan.
• Debt ceiling, spending out of control. blame republicans, blame congress. Wait.. doesnt the President sign all those spending bills?

Failure is an opportunity.
If you blame someone else,
there is no end to the blame.

Therefore the Master
fulfills her own obligations
and corrects her own mistakes.
She does what she needs to do
and demands nothing of others.

--Lao Tzu

I think the problem we are facing is a lack of good leadership.

It's truly depressing that there are people who can look at what's going on and blame the Democrats. People, like you QuantumPion, are just too stupid, too gullible. A government by the people doesn't work when the people are fools.

It's even more depressing that this country is so partisan that even reasonable requests draw comparison to arson. The most recent Continuing Resolution the House tried to pass does little more than delay the individual mandate (the same way Obama has already delayed it for businesses) and withdrawal the Congressional exemption: http://majorityleader.gov/newsroom/2013/09/leader-cantor-no-special-treatment-for-anyone-under-the-law.html

That's it. And supposedly that's still being "unreasonable". If that's unreasonable, why was Obama's delaying of the business mandate not unreasonable? The House isn't asking for a whole hell of alot here -- it's their job to pass a budget and there's an expensive program (to the tune of 200 billion a year) which was passed on purely partisan lines and isn't even favored by the populace.

I want to see the max and min values with associated dates for the 1979 - 2009 periods. Also, I don't understand why we (US Citizens) have paid roughly 1.3 million dollars to get vague and inconclusive results like this. I really wish that the NSF would start funding real science for a change. Here's an example of other weird stuff they research with our money. http://majorityleader.gov/YouCut/Review.htm "This work was supported by NSF grants ANS 0909388 and ARC 0901962, the NASA Cryosphere Program, and the Ohio State University Climate Water and Carbon Program. Field work along the K-transect has been supported by NWO/ALW." Here's the grant information. http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0909388 http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/pages/RecipientProjectSummary508.aspx?AwardIdSur=29630 I'm not totally against NSF I think it's an awesome idea but I would like some accountability.

Sure. It would take awhile to get the choreography down. I believe the Stirman group made videos of a paralyzed worm that wiggles its head and tail, and we have also done the same, although I don't have any videos of that up.

We actually discussed this in lab and I think "All the single ladies" would have been a good song choice since the worms are also single (albeit hermaphrodites).

Ultimately we decided not to pursue this, even though it would have been a great visual. Unfortunately, scientists today operate in a political environment that is increasingly hostile to research. See for example this Senator who wants the public to rifle through NSF grants and propose research projects to cut: http://majorityleader.gov/YouCut/Review.htm (For the record, this is a manifestly BAD idea.) At an institution where research is largely publicly funded I have to walk a fine line between making my research accessible to a broad audience and preventing the gimmicks from overshadow the real science.

  The CoLBeRT system is extremely useful for our understanding of the nervous system. It allows us to systematically probe the connections of the worm's nervous system to to understand how the signals these neurons create correlate with the worms' behavior. The research that this tool enables will yield insights that directly help us understand our own much more complicated brain. With certain political parties up in arms about cutting science research, I don't want to give anyone an easy bullseye by making a dancing worm. Very good idea, nonetheless.

So rather than research the issue yourself... you take the talking points from the Speaker of the House and House Majority Leader... you could at least make it less easy to make it clear where you got your talking points from (Bing, Google).

That being said... from that list (assuming they are the worst offenders given the source of the material)... how many have the kind of lasting change and massive regulation that the heath care... err sorry, health insurance reform would be. How many of those effectively nationalized 1/6th to 1/5th of our economy.

I'll tell ya a lil secret... when the republicans used this move to do something (other than break an unconstitutional filibuster on a court nominee)... it was wrong... and pointing to wrong behavior in order to justify behavior that is wrong and orders of magnitude more massive does not make it ok.

From http://www.majorityleader.gov/:

Boehner: Budget Victory Demonstrates Republicans' Commitment to Fiscal Discipline
WASHINGTON, D.C. - House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) today issued the following statement after House passage of the FY 2007 Budget Resolution:

Hastert is the Speaker of the House, not the Majority leader. If the summary can't get this basic fact right (or maybe it was the original article?), why believe any of the rest of it?

http://www.majorityleader.gov/

Roll this in the pages of your civics book and smoke it. It was obviously written by someone who didn't know a whole lot about the topic.

"Any type of attack nowadays will be labeled terroristic."

You mean like Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay calling removing brain-dead Terry Schiavo's feeding tube medical terrorism?

(The link is to Delay's own site: he's proud of invoking the spectre of terrorism to justify unprecedented government intrusion into personal medical decisions. DeLay also threatened to hold a judge in contempt of Congress for quashing a Congressional subpoena issued to compel the brain dead woman to testify. (Since removed form a conservative web site).

Now, before some winger decides to mod this off-topic, let me spell out what has this to do with IT security.

Very simple: our current "leaders" have shown they'll label anything -- even the legally uncontroversial, medically backed decisions of US judges -- as "terrorism", just in order to win points with their core fundamentalist Christian constituency.

If they'll do it about the private medical decisions of a family, they'll sure as hell do it about IT, if they think they can gain something by so doing. And they've shown that even if that "terrorism" label is obviously bunkum of the first order, they'll go ahead and use it.

Hey, it worked to get us into a pointless war in Iraq: remember when we were told about WMDs and Saddams "ties" to terrorists?

Like the boy who cried wolf, it should be clear by now that when a leading politician (and Delay is only one step away from being Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third in line of presidential succession, he's no fringe politician ) calls something "terrorism", we need to understand he's doing it to whip up our fears -- not to make us safer, but to get what he wants.

El replied: Gee, funny how those damn conservatives managed to pass all those with a Democrat majority in congress...

Gee, funny how that didn't happen. The Republicans have the majority in the House and the Senate now. When the PATRIOT Act was passed on 24 Oct 2001, they had the majority in the House and the Senate was evenly divided (see this page about the 107th congress).