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The Dems were outspent 7 to 1.

Bold claim. Citation? According to this recent New York Times article (October 27), Democrats outspent Republicans, $119 million vs. $79 million.

Perhaps you are referring to third-party spending, for which statistics are scantly available, and you are therefore pulling numbers out of the same dark quarters of your anatomy from whence the rest of your rhetoric comes?

You can talk all you want about the parties that bought messages and how much they paid. You might then take some time to look at how the VOTERS voted, and WHY. But really, I suspect you have little belief in or regard for the voting public; that's a bit too close to a stark reality your rhetoric seems to avoid.

for starters unemployment hasn't been over 10%. Close to it, but not over.

Unemployment peaked at 10.2% in October 2009.

Last I checked, 10.2% was more than 10%, not "close to it, but not over".

And if you're going to talk about systemic risks, you're going to have to go a lot further back than a decade. The stage was being set for the crash over 30 years ago. It was predicted by economists in the '90s (that's Clinton's term, in case you didn't notice). It was primarily congress that let us down, and both parties are responsible.

Forgot link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/us/politics/02donate.html

Oh, Hollywood moguls? Who exactly and what amount because its didn't come close to what the GOP and especially the Chamber of Commerce spent which I believe was at least $40 million. The links I provided in my other reply show 7 to 1 in September and 4 to 1 in Senate TOTAL and 2:1 in house TOTAL.

Foreign influences? Yeah, thats the GOP, not the Dems. The Chamber of Commerce has foreign members and because there is no more reporting laws thanks to the CU ruling, we'll never know.

In the California Governor race Meg Whitman spent 142 million dollars!! Brown spent 25 million. 142 million for a governor seat? Unheard of. Luckily for California, Brown won. I guess you can't buy every election.

Linda McMahon spent over $46 million of her family's fortune in an unsuccessful effort to replace retiring Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd.

Feingold's loss in Wisconsin? Johnson, ignoring all the help from the PACs, spent $8 million of his own personal fortune. Feingold spent 1/4 that.

Historically, the economy has always done well with a Republican congress and a Democrat president..

Your source says "the stock market". The stock market is not "the economy".

(If you look at personal income, every segment of the economy does better under Democratic Presidents, period.)

Andy Revkin, Democratic Party shill on science, sees a threat to science in the election results. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/the-real-threat-to-science-in-the-new-political-climate/

There fixed that for ya.

Andy Revkin, former NYT science reporter, sees a threat to science in the election results. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/the-real-threat-to-science-in-the-new-political-climate/

Less than 1% die in the line of duty.

I don't want to debate their pensions, but 1% attrition is not that low. Compare to writers, engineers, or sandwich makers. You graduate from the Police Academy with 99 other people and know that one of them will be killed. Oakland is hiring officers, I heard, so anyone who thinks 1% is a low enough ratio is welcome.

Even though only 1% may be killed, there are certainly other hardships of police work that are not that obvious to people with office jobs of "9 to 5" type. Police works 24/7/365.25, in any weather. I personally don't want to chase a drunk driver who is determined to kill himself (and others) on an icy 2-lane country road at 3:30am. Police officers have to do that if they have no better options. Also LEO's job brings him to worst places of cities, in worst circumstances. They are universally hated by their "clients," and in a sufficiently large city an officer has to watch his back - and his family's - at all times.

That said, you can certainly say that there are other jobs with similar hardships - sailors, oilmen, fishermen, even construction workers. I have no idea what, if any, benefits they have and how that compares to the police. My only point is that 1% of dying on the job is not something that I would dismiss out of hand. To compare, Shuttle astronauts have 2% chance of dying in any single flight.

That'd be like joining the army as a private at 20, serving for 20 years and then getting a colonel's salary until you die at 80 or so of old age. Soldiers don't get that

Sure soldiers don't get that. You need to be born as a colonel to become a colonel. There is absolutely no way for a soldier to become an NCO and then to study and become an officer. It's just so sad [/s]

You even got the 20 years term right:

The officer may request the retirement to be effective any date not later than 6 months from the date of PCS alert or the first day of the month after the officer attains 20 years of Active Federal Service, whichever is later.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/feed/

Keep dreaming.

As a paper, it is incredibly biased and even their map lists Democrats on top in every race. It's not alphabetical. It's not anything except biased. I'm really getting tired of seeing the "poor Democrats" being picked on and subtle stuff like this getting ignored. Is it a big deal, since--I hope--it will order based on percentage of vote garnered? No. Does it point out a huge problem with the paper's reliability? Yes.

NY Times Election Map [House]

Some background is in order here; this is not a typical piece for Silver. He did a companion to it a couple days ago, giving the reasons the GOP could overperform. These are just "what if" stories, designed to flesh out the message he's been driving for some time now, which is that this election has unusually high uncertainty. He isn't engaging in hackery and claiming everything will be fine for Democrats...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/opinion/05ackerman.html

i just read this last month

the common cold is an immune system overreaction. the virus does not cause the cold, our own bodies overreact to the cold, and that causes ALL symptoms. which explains why cold medicines work: they modulate the immune response, they don't actually fight the virus

But, as medical science has realized over the past few decades, the most prevalent cold viruses in fact do little direct harm to our cells. In one experiment in 1984, researchers at the University of Copenhagen performed biopsies on nasal tissue taken from people suffering severe colds, then did the same after the subjects had recovered. To the scientists’ surprise, none of the samples showed any sign of damage to the nasal tissue. Further vindicating the viruses themselves was another study around the same time showing that rhinoviruses infect only a small number of cells lining the nasal passages.

so the virus comes in, borrows some cellular machinery for a few days, makes a few copies, and then leaves. our body's response is to call out the entirety of the navy, the marines, the army, the air force, the cavalry, mortar batteries, drone predators, and tactical nuclear strikes. for a crime which amounts to a homeless guy squatting in an unused home for a day or two

$100 billion for space-based research or $100 billion for Welfare and War.

Not really a touch decision.

Exactly. I think everyone should go here to play "find NASA".

So you think Timothy McVey was acting alone and it was an isolated incident?

Whare about the white American terrorists? Sorting by color only serves bolster the point that Americans are zionists out to get rid of anybody that makes them uncomfortable.

Sorry, but the country of origin doesn't matter. When you play political games and arm warlords expect reprisal from everywhere including our own backyard. If you're scanning for likely threats at the time, their likelihood is going to be determined by the last terrorist attack, are you advocating that we change our scanning in reaction to threats or should we just effectively scan everyone like Israeli airlines have to do?

Of course given the crappy inspection process we have now, there's a lot of problems with having security theater,A friend of mine got on three flights going through security three times in two months with the same knife in his bag. Only the last checkpoint caught it, he forgot it was in there. The reality is that the list of people out to get us is small and as long as bombs don't make it on the plane the likelihood of other issues is small. Could 9/11 happen again? I don't think so, now that people understand what can happen when you let someone take over the plane they are much more willing to step up and settle the situation, one guy with a knife can't overpower 90 other people unless it's maybe a flight full of non-arse kicking grandmas.

No, they're turned into Canned Meat for which they get sued for.

A big part of the reason that the banks bounced back unscathed and that bailout made money is because the AIG bailout was done so poorly. We bought out AIG and put ourselves on the hook for all of AIGs poor decisions, paying out full dollar amounts on all of the ridiculous policies that AIG issued and even forfeiting the right to sue the policyholders for fraudulent policy applications. So saying that the bank bailouts made money is essentially ignoring huge losses that were stashed in another bailout.

If the AIG bailout were handled more reasonably (by paying out some percentage of policy value less than 100%) the banks would have been chastened for making the poor decisions that they made, they would be acting like an industry that made mistakes because they are an industry that made mistakes, and new regulation on their leverage and risk-taking would be more obviously necessary to everyone up and down the line. As it is the whole situation became a net win for a lot of these companies, and we're stuck wondering why they're handing out bonuses to the people that made it possible.

At some point in the race, they struck an 87-year-old woman named Claire Menagh, who was walking in front of the building and, according to the complaint, was "seriously and severely injured," suffering a hip fracture that required surgery. She died three months later of unrelated causes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/nyregion/29young.html?_r=1

The term "window" or "windows" is as generic as software "applications", or for non computer comparisons, "car" or "beer". You can call your products car or beer, but you can't CLAIM that as a trademark (especially if you were not the first to market).

Microsoft was denied the trademark for MANY years, but sadly government institutions like Patents and Trademark were handed over to lobbyists, and instead of being led by legal experts they were led by political appointees. (If you think I'm exaggerating, try to find any apointee in recent decades who was not a former "corporate IP lobbyist")

Here's a quick link to the 1993 episode of Microsoft's trademark decline. They failed many years before, and just kept re-filing knowing that the patent office would eventually change from it's policy of minimizing monopolies, to one that granted monopolies.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/25/business/microsoft-trademark-setback.html

Here's Obama satisfying his promise as far as he's legally capable, and doing it in one of the first orders he ever signs in his administration:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/us/politics/22gitmo.html

Here's the fact of the constitutional separation of powers coming back to foil his promise 5 months later:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html?hp

You'll note that this same story explains how things had already changed at GITMO, and that closing it isn't off the table, it's just buried under a pile of more important things that are backed up because his political opponents are more willing to destroy the nation than to let him succeed at anything.

Now, you can apologize, you can sulk off forever, or you can keep coming around acting like you didn't just have your ass handed to you. Seriously, you're an idiot.

Here's Obama satisfying his promise as far as he's legally capable, and doing it in one of the first orders he ever signs in his administration:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/us/politics/22gitmo.html

Here's the fact of the constitutional separation of powers coming back to foil his promise 5 months later:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html?hp

You'll note that this same story explains how things had already changed at GITMO, and that closing it isn't off the table, it's just buried under a pile of more important things that are backed up because his political opponents are more willing to destroy the nation than to let him succeed at anything.

Now, you can apologize, you can sulk off forever, or you can keep coming around acting like you didn't just have your ass handed to you. Seriously, you're an idiot.

You my friend would be incorrect. New York, New York, USA. I believe just shut down there DC grid a few years ago. It had powered a lot of the skyscraper's elevators etc. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/off-goes-the-power-current-started-by-thomas-edison/

NY Times had a terrific article on this a while ago.

And the fastest social and economic downturn is in America...coincidence?

Well, it would be a coincidence if it were true, but it's not. US GDP growth is a bit better than the average among the advanced/developed economies. Germany, Japan, UK, Russia and many others have had it much worse.

Many smaller countries have had it so much worse than the US that it's almost mind-blowing. A New York Times article with some pretty graphs illustrates this.

Think about why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, especially since he doesn't try to optimize it, and get back to me on that one. Think about how W2 earners pay taxes versus people that own real estate or stocks. If he actually just got a W2 check for $100M, he'd be well ahead of his secretary on his marginal rate (though he wouldn't be paying SS past $120K or so).

>>Medicare is the most efficient health provider in the country after the VA. /snort. Have you ever studied Medicare? It's an absolute disaster... and would be a joke if it wasn't the biggest program in the federal government. Fraud alone costs up to $60B a year (http://www.insurancefraud.org/medicarefraud.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_fraud) and waste (especially needless procedures) make up 10%-30% of the total budget (and that's according to the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/health/30use.html) Essentially, the Medicare schedule of reimbursements for services is one of the worst ideas in human history, and results in hospitals gaming the system. If they lose money on Procedure A, but gain money on Procedure B, guess which one the hospital will order, over and over again? And the whole thing runs on the trust system, so you can bill for patients that don't exist... I shudder to think about how many billions of dollars we've given to organized crime rackets in the last couple decades.

The VA has a budget of $125B and provides health care to 58.7M Americans, a cost of $2,100 per person. This includes funeral services, homelessness programs, and other VA-specific stuff. They pull in about $3.7B from third parties, so let's say those two cancel out.

Medicare and Medicaid cover 98M people at a cost of $750B (including state contributions), or a cost of $7,653 per person. It also doesn't cover everything, leaving seniors to buy Medicare Part B + Medicare Part D + medigap coverage or Medicare Advantage programs at around another $2,500 a year, or perhaps $250B total out of pocket from our seniors, for a total cost per person exceeding $10,000 per year.

These aren't especially good comparisons, because the VA only serves 23M actual veterans (the rest are dependents) and Medicare pretty much covers the elderly (though Medicaid, which is around $290B per annum covers the poor), but it does I think illustrate very nicely the problem.

If we could just eliminate medicare fraud and inefficiency, we'd save between $100B-$200B per year, which we could either use to help balance the budget (heh, funny concept, right?) or provide health care to 50M-100M Americans using the VA model.

It's possible to take a standard 35mm print (standard photo album size) and extract enough useful information during developing to make prints that look actually pretty damn good at, say, 11x17 or 24"x36" or even larger poster formats as long as the film was good quality, because it's a relatively analog photo (only constrained by the grain of the film itself)

People can't tell the difference between 13, 8 and 5 megapixels at 16"x24"

And almost not surprisingly, someone has actually researched that...

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/iphone-users-have-more-sex/

You're resting on the assumption that all groupings of people are created equal.

Far from it. That is why I did not say one word about voluntary collaborations of people formed for specifically political purposes.

Unions are, for the most part, involuntary groupings formed based on employment or occupation, having no political purpose behind them. No, "collective bargaining" is not a political purpose, it is a commercial one.

Collective bargaining is inherently political. Commerce is regulated by politics, and politics is influenced by commerce. And the power of the state is involved in any dispute between union and labor, e.g., the rights of labor to petition, contract matters, even the matter of obtaining a permit to picket. Before unions had political influence, the government would often come to the aid of companies in conflict with their workers. Think Department of Labor. Think Labor Day. Collective bargaining is nothing if not an exercise of political power.

Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit. And for the potential pedant, I'll add "that is legal for any other citizen to spend his money."

A corporation is not the same as "your money". A corporation is an artificial, legal entity created by a state that has its own assets and its own liability. Most particularly, it can sue, be sued, own property, even go bankrupt, but the assets of the owners of the corporation are protected. Normally, only knowing commissions of fraud or crime are grounds to "break the corporate veil" and give plaintiffs access to an owners personal assets.

This is an extraordinary protection. And has absolutely no constitutional basis (but you're welcome to look for it yourself). Thus, the rights of a corporation are completely arbitrary, created by government and therefore changeable and may be regulated by government for any reason. States like Delaware and South Dakota, for example, are comparably lenient on corporations, thereby to be more attractive as a registration site.

In other words, a person, e.g., you, have the right to express yourself in any way you choose. But if you incorporate, and your corporation makes money, you do NOT inherently have the right to spend your corporate assets in any way you choose. You could, of course, pay yourself a big bonus and then do what you want with it, but there are rules regarding liabilities and your obligations to your co-owners. Throwing a $million birthday bash for your wife with corporate funds is not a good idea.

The abuse comes because one can incorporate anything. Most taxis in New York are owned by a hand-full of corporations. But if a taxi hits you and you sue, you will find yourself suing a tiny nothing-corporation with no assets other than that individual taxi; the assets of the parent corporation will be out of your reach. The same chicanery is applied to politics.

The point is, the rights of a corporation have no constitutional basis. Really. Go and look for some. There is no language in the constitution pertinent to corporations (notice how many times the Constitution expressly says "person"), nor is there any evidence that the Founders considered corporations when framing the document. On the contrary, the matter of corporations was left entirely to the states until late in the 18th Century at the earliest.

No constitutional rights means free to regulate... speech, commerce, anything. And whocan argue that corporate speech isn't targeted, at least ultimately, to making a bigger buck? Hence, Kennedy and the Ro

NASA ... now has to hold the equivalent of a technology "bake sale" for funding. when does this stop?

It's all about what's "important" (he said sarcastically) - perspective:

• The 2011 budget for NASA: $19 billion
  [ NASA Budget]

• U.S. consumer spending on cosmetic surgery (2009): $10.5 billion (down 20% from 2007)
  [Spending Less on Plastic Surgery]
• U.S. consumer spending on cosmetics: $8 billion
  [ various ]

• U.S. Military budget (2010): $663.8 billion
  [Military budget of the United States]
• Iraq/Afghanistan war expenses to date: $1.121 trillion
  [ The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11]

After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

A research paper noted that

we also demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high-speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.

A further NYTimes article noted that

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers. “We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

Professors are also banning laptops from their classes. All in all there doesn't seem to be any actual evidance that kids benefit from the use of laptops et al in class. That's not saying they don't benefit from the use of technology in the learning process, but the use of individual laptops and Ipads and all that has so far been shown to be somewhat counter-productive.

After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

A research paper noted that

we also demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high-speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.

A further NYTimes article noted that

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers. “We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

Professors are also banning laptops from their classes. All in all there doesn't seem to be any actual evidance that kids benefit from the use of laptops et al in class. That's not saying they don't benefit from the use of technology in the learning process, but the use of individual laptops and Ipads and all that has so far been shown to be somewhat counter-productive.

Of course, given the time-lines involved, the first nuke might have ended up being used over Berlin.

The first nuke was slated for Japan as early as May 1943, though most of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project didn't know that. Whether that choice was due more to racism or to legitimate strategic concerns is an open issue.

I totally get your criticism of Obama.

It's not like he helped reduced the deficit by 126 Billion dollars in the worst economic crisis since the great depression.

...or...

cut our income taxes by $116B

...or...

reversed a trend of epic job loss and ended up created millions of jobs

I mean, he's all that Obamacare thingy, and we all know that that will massively increase the deficit in the long run.

So yeah... I'm right with you, brother.

Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.

How do you earn the right to criticize a game without playing it?

Hunting a group of deer, I heard coyotes approaching from a distance. I shot the deer quickly, only to have the coyotes turn on me and my steed instead. Later, hunting beaver in the mountains, I found myself more afraid of wolves and bears than any human threat.
"Westerns are about place," [Dan Houser] said. "They're not called outlaw films. They're not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They're called westerns. They're about geography."
"We're talking about a format that is inherently geographical," Mr. Houser added, "and you're talking about a medium, video games, the one thing they do unquestionably better than other mediums is represent geography."

Way Down Deep in the Wild, Wild West

Redudant. They are nothing more than a make-work program designed for the sole purpose of thuggish intimidation.

Even worse, they're using the Boy Scouts to develop their own version of the Hitler Youth, right in my own backyard.

We are the number one per capita nation for incarceration, but more interestingly, we also have the largest number of prison inmates.

We have 751 people in jail or prison per 100,000 population. UK? 151 per 100k. Germany 88. Japan 63. We throw people behind bars for offenses that would even amount to an arrest in most countries. I met people doing 20 years for a bag of crack the size of a sugar packet. I saw guys doing five for a phone call. I saw guys doing life because they were "co-conspirators" to something that happened 1,000 miles away without their knowledge.

God Bless America.

Note that it wasn't Fox News that did that...it was News Corp, the company that owns Fox News.

Not that it makes it any better.

Describing this as getting sued for outsmarting an algo is pretty misleading. The traders in question did find some flaws in the algo, but rather than exploiting them directly to profit from the algo machine, they used the algo to manipulate the market as a whole, so they could profit from that. They understood what would happen when they started manipulating the algo, and they should have understood that market manipulation of this kind illegal.

Misleading? Illegal?

Go see one of the links I posted: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1

Quote: "High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there"

Sure looks like one rule for the HFTs and another for the rest.

If you don't think the HFTs do all that and worse, you can google for evidence yourself.

Actually what is most disgusting is:

When those algo/HFT systems have bugs or lose big
a) the stock market rolls back the trades[1]
b) the small timers beating those algorithms get sued.[2]

But they don't do that when the small timers make mistakes or the algo/HFT systems beat the small timers.

Even though many of the HFT bunch are doing dubious stuff:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6456QB20100507
[2] http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3244186/norwegian-traders-convicted-for-outsmarting-us-stock-broker-algorithm/

Actually what is most disgusting is:

When those algo/HFT systems have bugs or lose big
a) the stock market rolls back the trades[1]
b) the small timers beating those algorithms get sued.[2]

But they don't do that when the small timers make mistakes or the algo/HFT systems beat the small timers.

Even though many of the HFT bunch are doing dubious stuff:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6456QB20100507
[2] http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3244186/norwegian-traders-convicted-for-outsmarting-us-stock-broker-algorithm/

Just from some quick Googling:

100% perfect trading streak

61-day perfect run

There are some in-depth analyses of the "Flash Crash" recently, for instance at:

Flash Crash Analysis

You're talking about the 2011 Mazda2, not the Mazda2 with the "SKYACTIV-G engine." While the 70mpg is high, because it is on the "Japanese cycle," it will likely hit the mid 40s under the EPA standards.

The NY Times clarified this point on their blog

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/mazda-next-generation-mazda-2-will-get-70-m-p-g/

Here's a snippet from a New York Times article, explaining that the 70 MPG number was achieved using the Japanese driving cycle, and that US customers can expect significantly less. 4:51 p.m. | Updated An earlier version of this post said the next Mazda 2 would get 70 miles per gallon. A Mazda spokesman clarified late on Thursday that the result was achieved from the Japanese test cycle. Fuel economy numbers will be lower in the United States. ... The Mazda release said the car would achieve 70 miles per gallon, but that number was based on the Japanese test cycle, meaning American mileage would be lower. A 15 percent increase from the existing Mazda 2 would result in a combined 37 m.p.g. (For comparison, the Toyota Prius, which gets a combined 50 m.p.g. from the Environmental Protection Agency, achieves 89 m.p.g. in the Japanese test.)

70mpg is misleading for this automobile, as is the article. These numbers are based on the Japanese test cycle, which also states the Toyota Prius achieves 89 mpg).

src : http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/mazda-next-generation-mazda-2-will-get-70-m-p-g/

-- cut --

The Mazda release said the car would achieve 70 miles per gallon, but that number was based on the Japanese test cycle, meaning American mileage would be lower. A 15 percent increase from the existing Mazda 2 would result in a combined 37 m.p.g. (For comparison, the Toyota Prius, which gets a combined 50 m.p.g. from the Environmental Protection Agency, achieves 89 m.p.g. in the Japanese test.)

-- cut --

It's too bad Wikileaks has such an obvious agenda.

Really? You mean to publish leaks? Or do you think it is something else?
Because if you think it's to paint somebody as good and somebody else as bad, I don't see it.
If you think it's to specifically paint the US government as bad, well there is at least one leaked document that does the reverse:

One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.

Remember, income tax is only one kind of tax (and some types are actually regressive). By a more inclusive measure of total taxation, the total taxation rate varies by only a few percent among the top 60% of all taxpayers, which all pay around 30%. The bottom 20% of earners pay only about 19%. So, total taxation is somewhat progressive, but not all that much.

Hmm, well, I managed to find the old article that gave me the impression of what I said, and this is the relevant text:

In 1996, Congress tried to address a wave of tax-driven expatriation by the wealthy by requiring former citizens to file tax returns for a decade and forbidding Americans who renounced their passports for tax reasons from visiting the United States.

The article does go on to say that it's not generally enforced, and it doesn't bother to link to, or even name the law they're basing this on, so it could simply be inaccurate. However, it is from the NY Times, so I'd like to hope they'd done a little fact checking.

wanna bet?

it appalls me that corporations have first amendment rights in the eyes of the law

I have referrals that tell you "I saw the most amazing ..." without providing attribution.

Its http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/21cyber.html?ref=us

"New York City has put the squeeze on Microsoft, negotiating a bulk software purchase that should lower technology costs for the city and give government workers access to more modern applications .. But Microsoft’s agreement with New York covers a broader set of applications beyond office software that Google has yet to match" link

What `broader set of applications' does MS offer that NYC needs to do its work?

I'd just like to point out that in 2003 an ENTIRE U.S. rare earth production facility was packed up and reassembled in China. Who allowed this to happen? G. W. Bush.

He allowed it to happen? Just what exactly would you have done in his shoes to stop it? Send in the National Guard? The only power he had that could have influenced them would be to lower their taxes or tell the EPA to back off. When corporations start to move their headquarters to greener pastures after Obama and his crew allow the corporate tax rate to jump back up, will you complain that they moved and then blame Obama for it?

Look, another Slashdotter that can't figure out how to use Google.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/politics/campaign/06ohio.html?_r=1

http://makethemaccountable.com/articles/Ohio_s_Odd_Numbers.htm

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud.html?q=2004votefraud.html

http://www.jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html