Unlike other new england/midatlantic states, Pennsylvania's Primary system is restricted by party registration. Democrats voting in the primary can only select who the democrat nominee is, and Republican can only select the republican, and third party selects third party, etc.
Last year, the big contest was Obama versus Clinton for Democrat presidential nominee. By the time PA came around in the primaries, late, only McCain remained, so a Republican vote meant nothing; only 26% of registered Republicans voted.
There was a huge drive by radio personalities last year to have Republicans switch their party status to Democrat to vote in the election. Additionally, many people felt abandoned by spend-happy double-talking Republicans. Many ended up leaving the party, 200,000 is the reported number. PA had a record turnout for Clinton, but that's besides the point.
Forward to 2009, the registered Republicans who are left are pretty much hard-core conservatives: stop the spending, get government out of business, etc etc
Over the last couple of years, Sen. Specter has behaved in a manner that is against the core of the party, voting in favor of dozens of high-priced spending bills, in favor of the bailouts, etc
Sen. Specter is up for re-election this year, and his advanced polling is showing his Republican support at about 20% for / 80% against. It is almost certain that he will not be the Republican nominee next spring, since he is running against the same challenger who almost unseated him 6 years ago when Specter had huge party support.
Sen. Specter has now switched his party to Democrat to take advantage of PA demographics, and possibly extend his political career an additional term instead of being voted out by his constituents in disgrace: "On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate" - Specter
But I thought that 1C was the predicted temperature change after 90 more years of all of the global carbon emissions, and it was going to have disasterous effects, like increased chance of hurricaines.
So we build off-shore platforms, presumably off the east coast US (which is known for its annual battering by said hurricaines), then we're going to increase the temperature locally in the one spot that would result in aggrevating those types weather patterns?
Doesn't a wave effect imply an impulse change at the source?
A wave is an oscillating change, therefore a gravity wave means that a change in a (point source) gravity.
Right now, we believe that mass is the only thing that creates gravity. A slow accumulation or decrease in a (point) mass such as a star or black hole would have an even smaller change as a waveform. If a star goes nova, from a macro perspective, isn't the same amount of mass/energy conserved but now dispersed over an area?
What is it out there that is producing these waves ?
Umm, you are incorrectly applying TCP/IP bandwidth demand to electricity demand. If the distribution company simply wanted to disconnect customers, they have breakers already in place to take care of that. But shutting off a retail customer violates the PUC agreements, and gets the utility in hot water (even if the customer isn't paying, but that's a separate issue). Utilities already measure peak customer current, and they build their systems to handle it. It's actually a fully recoverable expence -- why would a utility company limit you when the the PUC allows them to install a new transformer and charge you for it? It's the core of the electric service agreement. Not to mention that 99% of the electric grid communications runs on a private fiber network of UNIX machines.
Smart Grid is supposed to make retail customers sensitive to wholesale real-time pricing. It's like off-peak metering on steroids.
Here's the problem: Energy is Generated at Wholesale rates, sold to a Distribution company at wholesale rates, at real-time (hourly-fluctuatiing) prices. The real-time price is the intersection of real-time demand with real-time supply (Generation), with an inelastic demand curve and a price-elastic supply. The Electric Distribution Company (EDC) sells that power to End-Use Customers (EUC) at retail rates, at annual pricing (with some itemization depending on your state's PUC/utility retail agreements). The EUC's have no market impetus to actually conserve energy -- why should they, they are paying the same price to run an air conditioner at 1PM as watching TV with the lights on at 11pm at night -- yet the wholesale prices for the EDC are vastly due to peak/offpeak conditions. At its extremes, you end up like California in 2001 where your market blows up because the EDCs are getting charged more for electricity than they collect from the EUCs.
Let's say I am an End-Use Customer running an office building. The utility comes to me and says: "I know you are on retail rates with no fluctuation in price. If you can voluntarily cut some of your demand during the middle of the day, I (the EDC) will pay you (EUC) a piece of the difference in what it would have cost me with the higher demand vs. you not consuming and me having a lower demand. All you have to do is put your air conditioning on the second circuit hooked up to a Smart Meter. When the real-time price goes above $200/MW, I (the EDC) will cut your demand, and restore it when the price comes back down." The EUC (1) makes money from the EDC, (2) pays a smaller electric bill to the EDC. The EDC pays a smaller electric bill to the Generators, and keeps their annual cost lower.
Dammit, I'm getting sick and tired of this. Since I was involved in the 2003 blackout investigation for an outside utility company, here's what happened:
First Energy (OH) had some lines trip. Because of a race condition in their EMS (Electric Management System), the program never recognized that the lines tripped. Their State Estimator locked up, giving the dispatchers false information. Their redundant backup had the same code, used the same inputs, and got in the same race condition, and there was no watchdog system like Tivoli to measure that the systems were not outputting data.
Outside companies who observed odd flows on their systems tried to commuinicate with FE regarding the trippings, but FE said that the trippings were a data error (not recognizing they were real)
An hour and a half later, the grid split due to additional overload trippings in FE, and it all went to hell
FE executives begin spinning the story so fast you could have generated electricity if you stuck magnets on them
In the investigation, they found that too many companies were not adequately protecting their SCADA systems (it was so convenient to put the controls on VPN so you can work on an issue remotely), despite this was not one of the root causes.
Six months later, the government issued a report saying every utility was at fault, gave FERC the ability to set industry standards, and gave NERC the ability to fine companies a $1 mil/day for violating those standards.
5+ years later, we're all reacting to these CIP (Critical Infrastructure Protection) standards, which are all poorly defined, everyone's paranoid they may be violating something (which = fine), and so they're all overreacting by clamping down on anything that looks like a SCADA violation.
I'm tired of all this editorializing that thinks that this stuff is related, but it's not. The root cause was incompetence at FE -- cutting budgets so hard they got rid of tree trimming, failure to communicate properly in emergency situations, and lack of situational awareness -- combined with an over-reaching government that thinks the underlying communcations networks are unsecured. The "technical glitch" was an AIX UNIX machine with poor ICCP error handling, a message queue that failed to empty, and dispatchers that weren't trained how to handle the lack of data. DHS runs one test (Aurora) where they pretend to take over a generator with SCADA, then over-excite it for like an hour before they got it to spark, then suddenly they think the whole grid's at risk so they can get more government funding to justify their existence.
Yes, and I bought one (a Toyota Prius). Of course I did that in Fall 2007 before the summer spike, because I value efficiency over origin.
The problem is that today in PA, the price of gas (this afternoon) is $1.83/gal x (1.4086 pound / $) x (gal / 3.7854 L) = 0.68 GPB / L (you have a 33% markup in taxes over our taxes!) Dealers today have more Priuses on the lots than they know what to do with, because people won't pay the $28,000 price tag for a 40% increase in mpg. At current prices, it's cheaper to pay $12-15,000 for a compact car at 30 mpg and eat the difference in fuel.
And that's what I see GM is up against. They are going to pop out a car that I'm sure will start at $30,000 for a compact car and go up to $40,000 with options (the gas/hybrid Prius MSRP is about $25,000 base). You won't have liquid fuel costs, since the fuel shows up on your electric bill, but it's still $0.0729/kW (that's from Exelon/PECO's web site for Residential rates). Wikipedia says that the Volt's battery capacity is 16 kWh, (wow, Wiki's cost estimates go from $35-40,000, only 30 with tax subsidies), with an effective use of 8.8 kWh. So, assuming you drive a full battery 6 days a week, 4 weeks a month, that's 6 x 4 x 8.8 x 0.0729 = $15.39/month to fuel a car, not bad! But what's harder to estimate is that your monthly loan payments are probably $300 higher... so that's where your gas savings go.
This is the country that strictly enforces a one-child-per-family law, and you think the Chinese government actually wants more people to take care of?
Don't worry, the press will treat this as fairly as they did when it was revealed that Governor Palin of Alaska had an email account for work use, and a separate email account for home use.
The fact that he keeps talking about "megawatts of energy per hour" puts my cynicism into overdrive
Not to me. Let's look at what this device does:
Its fuel is trash, even crap that can't be burned in a traditional Municipal Solid Waste "trash to steam" generator.
Not only that, it burns the fuel at such a high temperature, there's even less ash output than a MSW, so it's cleaner for the environment.
... AND it net positive produces electricity. Sure it takes some energy to get the plasma heated up at the beginning, but then you burn the fuel, force the outdraft through a combustion turbine, and you have electrons ready to go.
Now, if I were a new company, where would I want to build these things? New Jersey and Northeast Pennsylvania! You have huge landfills going back half a century filled with trash, so plenty of fuel. It's in the ultra-"green" part of the US, so double plus good on your environmental compliance, NJ might even throw you tax credits. And you have the largest deregulated bulk electric market in the country, where the most demand (highest $) for electricity is in... NJ and PA. You shovel trash into it 24 hours a day (lord knows there's enough trash), and with constant output, you're now qualified as a baseload unit for capacity credits in RPM = more money. Most cash for the electron, people pay you to take their trash, and you're green as can be.
But what I would really like to see... is a comprehensive breakdown of funding...
The problem is, the Obama donations have been shown to not even implement the simplest of credit card validation. Their software readily accepts made-up names and addresses, gift cards, and doesn't even filter for credit cards sourced by American accounts (which is a violation of campaign finance laws to have contributions from foreign countries).
In early October, citizens began reporting fraudulent donations made to the Obama campaign on their credit cards. Flash in the pan, lasted about 2 days on the talk radio circuit, but...
PowerLine broke the story by discovering that Obama's donation site bills no questions asked, including readers from England and made-up names/addresses...
National Journal finds gift cards work which can be purchased anywhere in the world, and wonders why the FEC isn't enforcing this campaign law violation...
Essentially, they are using the $200 reporting limit to masquerade illegal donation practices, and none of it will hit the mainstream media until November 5th.
Well, most of the time, the plants sit locked up and offline. About a week before the projected peak, the regional entities will issue hot weather alerts indicating if it is projected that those "peakers" would be needed. On the bulk power level, electricity cannot be stored, it can only be produced in near-equal amounts to the energy being consumed by residential, commercial, and industrial demand sources. It does noone any good to have a powerplant on standby if its energy is not needed.
In normal operations, you have a class of cheap-fuel plants (aka base load) running on Coal and Nuclear that pretty much run flat-out full output all 365 days of the year. Somewhere in there you also have your Wind, Solar and Hydro plants, no fuel cost but less predictability & control of their output. Next, you have your marginal Combined Cycle plants running on Oil and Natural Gas, which have the capability to control and maintain their output between minimum and maximum.
At the top of the heap are those Combustion Turbine (jet engines strapped to the ground) and Diesel, very expensive but very very quick response -- these are the resources that run 50 hours a year. But that's ok, because 360/365 days of the year you don't need that amount of generation to be produced.
It makes you wonder what great ideas and discoveries are lying hidden in old journals that no-one ever reads.
That's pretty much why the word discover was used during the Renaissance -- scientific belief at the time was that the classical civilizations had already learned how the world worked, but the knowledge was lost in the middle ages, and science simply "removed the cover" that was veiling this knowledge. Any in many ways they were right -- the Greeks had invented the steam engine and napalm, and the Babylonians had electroplating devices -- but the knowledge was lost with the collapse of those civilizations.
The problem is that the people who were supposed to oversee Fannie Mae are the same people that are now supporting a certain Democrat candidate for president, and it would not be beneficial for the media to expose those relationships to the public-at-large until after the election.
Democratic Congressional Black Caucus, who was praised by Fannie Mae's CEO Daniel Mudd for passing beneficial legislation, in the name of loosening regulations allowing people with poor credit scores to overextend themselves with home loans. We know today how that turned out.
I don't understand how the Enron Trial is on the tip of everyone's tongue, but the media isn't calling to put these banking executive in jail for a fraud that is 10x worse!
Barack Obama, for four years in the 1990s, you were on the executive board of an education foundation named the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, founded by ex-Weather Underground Organization leader William Ayers. In a spring debate, you claimed he was "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis", and just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood". Given that you launched your presidential campaign from Mr. Ayers home, how do you explain this discrepancy?
Barack Obama, records show that you have received the second largest amount of monetary donations from the now bankrup Fannie Mae mortgage lender. In 2005, you were praised by Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd because of your work in congress on Fannie's behalf. Was the praise because of your vote against the Housing Reform Act of 2005 that would have prevented the 2008 collapse of the lending institutions?
Barack Obama, you have often touted your experience as a community organizer in the streets of Chicago as evidence of your qualifications to lead. You have worked extensively with one such group, ACORN, which recently endorsed you for president, where you acknowledged your work with ACORN in Project Vote in 2004. Given that ACORN members are frequently convicted of committing voter fraud, can you please explain your relation to this organization?
The system has been programmed to differentiate people by their clothing. Someone in a suit, for instance, would more likely be a visitor and not a potential shuttle rider.
Because nothing says "Good Idea" like differentiating between people based on their appearance.
It would be interesting to see if the Congressional Democrats fared as well as their counterparts in the executive in matters of fiscal responsibility.
The answer, not surprisingly, is No. The last time the debt actually decreased was 1961.
It would be interesting to see if this supports the electric universe theory, that the sun is not powered by gravity fusion, but is instead a giant Plasma Lamp. The purpose of the probe is to measure magnetic field lines of the sun from earth's low orbit, and perhaps it can travel far enough in its 8 minutes to detect the radial field lines that the EU theories say must exist...
That's funny, they did just that about 5 hours before you made your post.
Obama campaign highlights Palin's 'zero' experience. Yeah, except that she has been in political positions 5 years longer (1992) than Obama has (1997), and has gone further up the executive branch. This is not the battle they want to fight.
Throwing a log on the fire, the Electric Universe people believe that "red-shift" in a galaxy is the result of one cluster being pushed out as a plasma ejection from a larger galaxy, one blue-shifts as it is pushed closer to us, and one red-shifts as it travels away, and that redshifting is not doppler-effect related.
Gravity Universe people use red-shift as the basis of measuring the age of the universe, the Big Bang, tthe need for dark energy, etc etc. That, plus luminocity, is the basis of estimating the age/distance from us.
It would be interesting if the EU people were right, and we just had an 80 year interlude of bad astronomy.
If you were an oil trader and knew that if we started drilling today and that oil wouldn't get used for another 10 years, why in God's name would that affect your bidding on contracts for September delivery?
Oh, I don't know, because if you're trading on the futures market, you locked in your September 2008 contracts way back in Fall 2007. If you're going after energy contracts now for next month, that's practically spot market pricing, which can be even more volitile.
What they're trading now is setting up contracts for Summer 2009 onwards. It takes 1-2 years to build a land rig (ANWAR) and 3-4 years to complete a sea rig. Having Congress open up more leases for land drilling, and permitting off-shore drilling, will increase supply which can only reduce prices. Since it's a future development, it reduces the future price. Since my future price will be less, I will charge less now, since I won't need to have as much cash on hand next year to pay for the oil then.
Slashdot Mirror
For those that are not aware:
Paying for news is like torturing for information -- the only thing you're left with at the end of the day is a pile of suspect agenda-laden chatter.
I prefer to get my news the old fashioned way, from grass-roots advocates and disaffected whisleblowers.
But I thought that 1C was the predicted temperature change after 90 more years of all of the global carbon emissions, and it was going to have disasterous effects, like increased chance of hurricaines.
So we build off-shore platforms, presumably off the east coast US (which is known for its annual battering by said hurricaines), then we're going to increase the temperature locally in the one spot that would result in aggrevating those types weather patterns?
Doesn't a wave effect imply an impulse change at the source?
A wave is an oscillating change, therefore a gravity wave means that a change in a (point source) gravity.
Right now, we believe that mass is the only thing that creates gravity. A slow accumulation or decrease in a (point) mass such as a star or black hole would have an even smaller change as a waveform. If a star goes nova, from a macro perspective, isn't the same amount of mass/energy conserved but now dispersed over an area?
What is it out there that is producing these waves ?
Umm, you are incorrectly applying TCP/IP bandwidth demand to electricity demand. If the distribution company simply wanted to disconnect customers, they have breakers already in place to take care of that. But shutting off a retail customer violates the PUC agreements, and gets the utility in hot water (even if the customer isn't paying, but that's a separate issue). Utilities already measure peak customer current, and they build their systems to handle it. It's actually a fully recoverable expence -- why would a utility company limit you when the the PUC allows them to install a new transformer and charge you for it? It's the core of the electric service agreement. Not to mention that 99% of the electric grid communications runs on a private fiber network of UNIX machines.
Smart Grid is supposed to make retail customers sensitive to wholesale real-time pricing. It's like off-peak metering on steroids.
Here's the problem: Energy is Generated at Wholesale rates, sold to a Distribution company at wholesale rates, at real-time (hourly-fluctuatiing) prices. The real-time price is the intersection of real-time demand with real-time supply (Generation), with an inelastic demand curve and a price-elastic supply. The Electric Distribution Company (EDC) sells that power to End-Use Customers (EUC) at retail rates, at annual pricing (with some itemization depending on your state's PUC/utility retail agreements). The EUC's have no market impetus to actually conserve energy -- why should they, they are paying the same price to run an air conditioner at 1PM as watching TV with the lights on at 11pm at night -- yet the wholesale prices for the EDC are vastly due to peak/offpeak conditions. At its extremes, you end up like California in 2001 where your market blows up because the EDCs are getting charged more for electricity than they collect from the EUCs.
Let's say I am an End-Use Customer running an office building. The utility comes to me and says: "I know you are on retail rates with no fluctuation in price. If you can voluntarily cut some of your demand during the middle of the day, I (the EDC) will pay you (EUC) a piece of the difference in what it would have cost me with the higher demand vs. you not consuming and me having a lower demand. All you have to do is put your air conditioning on the second circuit hooked up to a Smart Meter. When the real-time price goes above $200/MW, I (the EDC) will cut your demand, and restore it when the price comes back down." The EUC (1) makes money from the EDC, (2) pays a smaller electric bill to the EDC. The EDC pays a smaller electric bill to the Generators, and keeps their annual cost lower.
Dammit, I'm getting sick and tired of this. Since I was involved in the 2003 blackout investigation for an outside utility company, here's what happened:
I'm tired of all this editorializing that thinks that this stuff is related, but it's not. The root cause was incompetence at FE -- cutting budgets so hard they got rid of tree trimming, failure to communicate properly in emergency situations, and lack of situational awareness -- combined with an over-reaching government that thinks the underlying communcations networks are unsecured. The "technical glitch" was an AIX UNIX machine with poor ICCP error handling, a message queue that failed to empty, and dispatchers that weren't trained how to handle the lack of data. DHS runs one test (Aurora) where they pretend to take over a generator with SCADA, then over-excite it for like an hour before they got it to spark, then suddenly they think the whole grid's at risk so they can get more government funding to justify their existence.
Yes, and I bought one (a Toyota Prius). Of course I did that in Fall 2007 before the summer spike, because I value efficiency over origin.
The problem is that today in PA, the price of gas (this afternoon) is $1.83/gal x (1.4086 pound / $) x (gal / 3.7854 L) = 0.68 GPB / L (you have a 33% markup in taxes over our taxes!) Dealers today have more Priuses on the lots than they know what to do with, because people won't pay the $28,000 price tag for a 40% increase in mpg. At current prices, it's cheaper to pay $12-15,000 for a compact car at 30 mpg and eat the difference in fuel.
And that's what I see GM is up against. They are going to pop out a car that I'm sure will start at $30,000 for a compact car and go up to $40,000 with options (the gas/hybrid Prius MSRP is about $25,000 base). You won't have liquid fuel costs, since the fuel shows up on your electric bill, but it's still $0.0729/kW (that's from Exelon/PECO's web site for Residential rates). Wikipedia says that the Volt's battery capacity is 16 kWh, (wow, Wiki's cost estimates go from $35-40,000, only 30 with tax subsidies), with an effective use of 8.8 kWh. So, assuming you drive a full battery 6 days a week, 4 weeks a month, that's 6 x 4 x 8.8 x 0.0729 = $15.39/month to fuel a car, not bad! But what's harder to estimate is that your monthly loan payments are probably $300 higher... so that's where your gas savings go.
Thank you Adult Stem Cell Research! You're using your own cells, so you don't run those nasty tumor risks like that other stem cell technology...
Do you see the Web-Browser-As-OS implemented as a virtual machine capable of running inside another operating system?
This is the country that strictly enforces a one-child-per-family law, and you think the Chinese government actually wants more people to take care of?
Don't worry, the press will treat this as fairly as they did when it was revealed that Governor Palin of Alaska had an email account for work use, and a separate email account for home use.
The fact that he keeps talking about "megawatts of energy per hour" puts my cynicism into overdrive
Not to me. Let's look at what this device does:
Now, if I were a new company, where would I want to build these things? New Jersey and Northeast Pennsylvania! You have huge landfills going back half a century filled with trash, so plenty of fuel. It's in the ultra-"green" part of the US, so double plus good on your environmental compliance, NJ might even throw you tax credits. And you have the largest deregulated bulk electric market in the country, where the most demand (highest $) for electricity is in... NJ and PA. You shovel trash into it 24 hours a day (lord knows there's enough trash), and with constant output, you're now qualified as a baseload unit for capacity credits in RPM = more money. Most cash for the electron, people pay you to take their trash, and you're green as can be.
Did you even read it?
But what I would really like to see ... is a comprehensive breakdown of funding ...
The problem is, the Obama donations have been shown to not even implement the simplest of credit card validation. Their software readily accepts made-up names and addresses, gift cards, and doesn't even filter for credit cards sourced by American accounts (which is a violation of campaign finance laws to have contributions from foreign countries).
Essentially, they are using the $200 reporting limit to masquerade illegal donation practices, and none of it will hit the mainstream media until November 5th.
Well, most of the time, the plants sit locked up and offline. About a week before the projected peak, the regional entities will issue hot weather alerts indicating if it is projected that those "peakers" would be needed. On the bulk power level, electricity cannot be stored, it can only be produced in near-equal amounts to the energy being consumed by residential, commercial, and industrial demand sources. It does noone any good to have a powerplant on standby if its energy is not needed.
In normal operations, you have a class of cheap-fuel plants (aka base load) running on Coal and Nuclear that pretty much run flat-out full output all 365 days of the year. Somewhere in there you also have your Wind, Solar and Hydro plants, no fuel cost but less predictability & control of their output. Next, you have your marginal Combined Cycle plants running on Oil and Natural Gas, which have the capability to control and maintain their output between minimum and maximum.
At the top of the heap are those Combustion Turbine (jet engines strapped to the ground) and Diesel, very expensive but very very quick response -- these are the resources that run 50 hours a year. But that's ok, because 360/365 days of the year you don't need that amount of generation to be produced.
It makes you wonder what great ideas and discoveries are lying hidden in old journals that no-one ever reads.
That's pretty much why the word discover was used during the Renaissance -- scientific belief at the time was that the classical civilizations had already learned how the world worked, but the knowledge was lost in the middle ages, and science simply "removed the cover" that was veiling this knowledge. Any in many ways they were right -- the Greeks had invented the steam engine and napalm, and the Babylonians had electroplating devices -- but the knowledge was lost with the collapse of those civilizations.
The problem is that the people who were supposed to oversee Fannie Mae are the same people that are now supporting a certain Democrat candidate for president, and it would not be beneficial for the media to expose those relationships to the public-at-large until after the election.
I don't understand how the Enron Trial is on the tip of everyone's tongue, but the media isn't calling to put these banking executive in jail for a fraud that is 10x worse!
Barack Obama, for four years in the 1990s, you were on the executive board of an education foundation named the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, founded by ex-Weather Underground Organization leader William Ayers. In a spring debate, you claimed he was "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis", and just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood". Given that you launched your presidential campaign from Mr. Ayers home, how do you explain this discrepancy?
Barack Obama, records show that you have received the second largest amount of monetary donations from the now bankrup Fannie Mae mortgage lender. In 2005, you were praised by Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd because of your work in congress on Fannie's behalf. Was the praise because of your vote against the Housing Reform Act of 2005 that would have prevented the 2008 collapse of the lending institutions?
Barack Obama, you have often touted your experience as a community organizer in the streets of Chicago as evidence of your qualifications to lead. You have worked extensively with one such group, ACORN, which recently endorsed you for president, where you acknowledged your work with ACORN in Project Vote in 2004. Given that ACORN members are frequently convicted of committing voter fraud, can you please explain your relation to this organization?
The system has been programmed to differentiate people by their clothing. Someone in a suit, for instance, would more likely be a visitor and not a potential shuttle rider.
Because nothing says "Good Idea" like differentiating between people based on their appearance.
It would be interesting to see if the Congressional Democrats fared as well as their counterparts in the executive in matters of fiscal responsibility.
The answer, not surprisingly, is No. The last time the debt actually decreased was 1961.
Also known as, "Truth has a well-known liberal bias."
This is why I prefer to stick to facts. There's less slant that way.
It would be interesting to see if this supports the electric universe theory, that the sun is not powered by gravity fusion, but is instead a giant Plasma Lamp. The purpose of the probe is to measure magnetic field lines of the sun from earth's low orbit, and perhaps it can travel far enough in its 8 minutes to detect the radial field lines that the EU theories say must exist...
That's funny, they did just that about 5 hours before you made your post.
Obama campaign highlights Palin's 'zero' experience. Yeah, except that she has been in political positions 5 years longer (1992) than Obama has (1997), and has gone further up the executive branch. This is not the battle they want to fight.
Throwing a log on the fire, the Electric Universe people believe that "red-shift" in a galaxy is the result of one cluster being pushed out as a plasma ejection from a larger galaxy, one blue-shifts as it is pushed closer to us, and one red-shifts as it travels away, and that redshifting is not doppler-effect related.
Gravity Universe people use red-shift as the basis of measuring the age of the universe, the Big Bang, tthe need for dark energy, etc etc. That, plus luminocity, is the basis of estimating the age/distance from us.
It would be interesting if the EU people were right, and we just had an 80 year interlude of bad astronomy.
If you were an oil trader and knew that if we started drilling today and that oil wouldn't get used for another 10 years, why in God's name would that affect your bidding on contracts for September delivery?
Oh, I don't know, because if you're trading on the futures market, you locked in your September 2008 contracts way back in Fall 2007. If you're going after energy contracts now for next month, that's practically spot market pricing, which can be even more volitile.
What they're trading now is setting up contracts for Summer 2009 onwards. It takes 1-2 years to build a land rig (ANWAR) and 3-4 years to complete a sea rig. Having Congress open up more leases for land drilling, and permitting off-shore drilling, will increase supply which can only reduce prices. Since it's a future development, it reduces the future price. Since my future price will be less, I will charge less now, since I won't need to have as much cash on hand next year to pay for the oil then.
-- Scott