Republicans vote with wallets:

The Bush White House is destroying its own party...

RNC faces donor falloff, fires solicitors - Nation/Politics - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper:

"The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.
Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.

'Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue,' said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national committee. "

According to the White House, all these former donors must be a group of un-patriotic and stupid racists.

Update from townhall.com here:

Ring, Ring

Emily: "Hello?'

Caller: "Hi, ma'am, this is the Republican National Committee calling."

Emily (aside to me, with a big grin on her face): "It's the RNC."

Caller: "We're just calling to see at what level you'd be comfortable renewing your contribution. Would $75 be all right?"

Emily: "How about nothing?"

Caller: "Oh, why's that?"

Emily: "I'm not real happy with the immigration bill."

Caller: "Well, that's not Republicans. Just the President loves that immigration bill."

Emily: "The President is head of the Republican Party."

Caller: "Not for long."

Emily: "And, Republican senators are supporting the bill. Why would I give you guys money to get them re-elected?"

Caller: "That's ridiculous."

Emily: "Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna give you any money. You just called me ridiculous."

The Bush administration spins off into oblivion

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

Maybe it's the conservatives that should be pushing for impeachment. Peggy Noonan lists some of the sins of the Bush administration.

Among the quotes:

"This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place."

"You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad."

"The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

"What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks."

If you insist on acting like the other party that the electorate will eventually get around to simply electing the other party. Why vote for a fake when you can get the genuine article? That is going to be both of the Bush presidents legacy. The conservative base didn't vote for Bush so he could have photo-ops with Ted Kennedy.

Windows Home Server Preview

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows Home Server Preview

This looks like the next wave of home networking. Our family of 3 now has 6 computers running on the network, and no clear backup plan for each computer. We will be an early adopter of this technology once it become available.

Windows Home Server (WHS) is not about streaming digital media around the home, though of course it does include Windows Media Connect technology and can be used in this fashion. No, WHS is about storage first, and remote access second. WHS's storage features are innovative and will likely blow people away: The product moves the notion of backup from the PC level to the family level, and lets you backup all of the machines in your home seamlessly. Best of all, you can add storage however you'd like, and WHS will simply aggregate all of that space into a single, drive-letter-less storage pool.

WHS's remote access features will allow users to access any of their home PCs from anywhere online, duplicating functionality that people today associate with products like GoToMyPC. Microsoft will even throw in a free domain name, making this access easier than ever. Note that remote access requires Windows XP Pro or higher, or Windows Vista Home Premium or higher.

Finally, in a nod to enthusiasts, WHS will be available in both pre-made server appliances from companies like HP, and as a separate software product that you can install to any PC or server. WHS is based on Windows Server 2003 R2, and not Longhorn Server as rumored. It features a super-simple tabbed-based interface that beginners and advanced users will both enjoy, and will ship in late 2007. HP will show off a cool and compact WHS design, as will original device manufacturers like Inventec and Quanta.

"Let Are Kids Walk"

Image of protester seeking to allow Texas students who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam to be allowed to act like they graduated and walk across the stage.

Is the future a six stroke engine?

INVENTION AWARDS Six Strokes of Genius - Popular Science

This sounds like a cool idea. Harness the heat loss of an engine by creating steam to power an extra power cycle. Could increase efficiency in gas powered engines as much as 40%.

A typical engine wastes three quarters of its energy as heat. Crower's prototype, the single-cylinder diesel eight-horsepower Steam-o-Lene engine, uses that heat to make steam and recapture some of the lost energy. It runs like a conventional four-stroke combustion engine through each of the typical up-and-down movements of the piston (intake, compression, power or combustion, exhaust). But just as the engine finishes its fourth stroke, water squirts into the cylinder, hitting surfaces as hot as 1,500°F. The water immediately evaporates into steam, generating a 1,600-fold expansion in volume and driving the piston down to create an additional power stroke. The upward sixth stroke exhausts the steam to a condenser, where it is recycled into injection water.

You Don't Have to Be Einstein to Get Rich: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

You Don't Have to Be Einstein to Get Rich

Ohio State economics professor Jay Zagorsky suggests different factors: "Staying married, not getting divorced, thinking about savings." Wow

The New Religion

Greenpeace Builds Replica of Noah's Ark

Climate Change is the new religion of the collectivists.

Who Are the Merchants of Fear?

Who Are the Merchants of Fear?:

More from Cockburn. If he's not careful he'll be branded as a conservative, like they did Imus:

"By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the 'challenge' of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988 it gave us the IPCC.

The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not long before some new UN moot, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis. The cry is taken up by the IPCC and headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's WMDs.

When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating factors are 'discovered,' such as the sulfate aerosols popular in the 1990s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or inconvenient data are waterboarded into submission, as happened with ice-core samples that failed to confirm the modelers' need for record temperatures today. As Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, 'Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable.'"

Is Global Warming a Sin?

Is Global Warming a Sin?

On our recent trip to the Dry Tortugas the family had an epiphany. When the sun comes up, the temperature rises. When it sets, the temperature drops. Based on this intriguing data, we have come to the conclusion that it's possible the sun may have an effect on climate change.

Uh, make that "Climate Change" which is the world's latest mass religion and clearly has nothing to do with the sun.

The link is to an Alexander Cockburn article in "The Nation." This heretical piece concludes that the sun has an effect on "Climate Change." How ridiculous. It's been proven beyond any doubt that global warming is 100% caused by mankind. What's wrong with "The Nation"? They have always been so reliably leftist.

We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO₂ in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO₂ changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth's increasingly hot molten core.

Clearly, Cockburn has a death wish to even think of publishing something so ludicrous.

Happy International Communist Labor Day

In honor of May Day, the international (communist) celebration of labor, let's take a moment to wish that Fidel Castro rots in hell.
Here's hoping that Cuba finds it freedom soon. There are infinitely better ways to travel in the free world.

Taking Apart Tenet

George Tenet's disgraceful new book. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

The money quote:

To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

It makes me believe the U.S. would best be served by abolishing the CIA (and the State Department for that matter) and replacing it with something more... competent.

Oops.

My Way News Photo - Highway Collapse

Free Carbon Offsets

Free Carbon Offsets - Home

These are apparently just as effective as the ones sold by AlGore

Is Mercury in CFL's a concern?

Instapundit.com -

There is this to ponder:

Is it true that compact fluorescent light bulbs contain harmful mercury?

Compact fluorescent lights contain a very small amount of mercury, significantly less than those in fever thermometers. This small amount of mercury slowly bonds with the phosphor coating on the lamp interior as the lamp ages, prohibiting its entry into the atmosphere. Even breaking a fluorescent bulb is not a significant health risk because the amount of mercury vapor released is so small that it dissipates into the air with a minimal chance of inhalation.

And this:

Ironically, compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don't contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America’s air and water results from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent.

Then again, it might be enough for John Edwards and his friends to sue for damages...

Miami-Dade county leads Florida

ForeclosureS.com: 364,000 owners staring down foreclosure in 2007 | Valuation Review News | Daily News | Valuation Review:

Of every 1,000 U.S. homeowners, 2.4 faced losing their property to foreclosure in the first three months of 2007

Missing Coast Guard Mascot Found In Pyro Box - Yahoo! News

Missing Coast Guard Mascot Found In Pyro Box - Yahoo! News

Almost two days after she was reported missing, the year-old black Labrador mascot of the Port Canaveral Coast Guard Station was found around 6:45 a.m. Tuesday in a locked steel container full of flares and other pyrotechnics, Local 6 News partner Florida Today reported. She had been missing since around 2 p.m. Sunday.

Liberty was with the last man to check the pyrotechnics box. She must have crawled up into the 4-by-4-foot steel container while it was raining and he closed her up in it without noticing, Rice said.

The Best Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: Scientific Lab Test vs. Incandescent - Popular Mechanics

The Best Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: Scientific Lab Test vs. Incandescent - Popular Mechanics

Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Summary

Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Summary

National average for benefits compensation is about 43% of gross salary, which includes:

10% Vacation/Paid Leave
3.5% overtime or bonuses
11.7% Insurance and disability
6.25% Retirement and Savings programs
11.4% Legally required benefits including FICA, Medicate, Workers comp & unemployment insurance.

Top 10 Richest Zip Codes

REALTOR® Magazine - Daily News

Greenwich, CT zip 06831 is #1, with a median price of nearly $3 Million.

Tracfone $99 for 1 year service, 900 minutes airtime

TracFone Nationwide Prepaid Wireless

Latest property tax reform proposal

FAR - News & Events - Senate Democrats offer wide-ranging tax reform proposal

The Democratic proposal would flesh out [portability]. It would exempt homeowners from taxes on the difference between the values of the old and new homes – up to a maximum of $250,000 – if they move to a more expensive house. If they go to a cheaper one, they would pay no more than they did on their old house.

The portability provision would be linked to reducing Save Our Homes benefits. The annual tax limit would go to 3 percent plus inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, but no more than 6 percent total. The result would be higher taxes for homesteads.

‘Irresponsible’ Mortgages Have Opened Doors to Many of the Excluded - New York Times

‘Irresponsible’ Mortgages Have Opened Doors to Many of the Excluded - New York Times

Article is more balanced than you would expect of the NYT.

Almost every new form of mortgage lending — from adjustable-rate mortgages to home equity lines of credit to no-money-down mortgages — has tended to expand the pool of people who qualify but has also been greeted by a large number of people saying that it harms consumers and will fool people into thinking they can afford homes that they cannot.

Congress is contemplating a serious tightening of regulations to make the new forms of lending more difficult. New research from some of the leading housing economists in the country, however, examines the long history of mortgage market innovations and suggests that regulators should be mindful of the potential downside in tightening too much.

M. Crichton Interview on Global Warming

The Daily Ablution: Seven Answers From ...

Any departure from environmental orthodoxy is marked by ad hominem attack, vigorous spread of false information, claims of criminality and mental derangement, and general nastiness. Apparently this is one area where reasonable people cannot disagree.

It's interesting that any entity as complex, changing and difficult to comprehend as the environment should be guarded by organizations that allow no deviation from a single point of view toward what needs to be done. One might have predicted a rather broad range of environmental viewpoints, promoted by an equally broad range of institutions and activist organizations. There is some variation among organizations, of course. But on the subject of global warming, no deviation. That is to say, I am aware of no environmental organization that does not claim global warming is a major threat that must be dealt with now.

I leave it to your readers to explain that puzzle. Complex subject, simplistic response.

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Fooling the College Board

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Fooling the College Board

Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage

The Recorder

The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America . . .