What I really wanted to ask is why the Hell I have to keep updating the apps on my iPhone all time time & why you don't fix that? Sen.McCain>•<Think on this a little while.>•< 1 hour ago
Watch LIVE Online the Senate hearing shifting profits offshore to avoid US taxes (Apple Inc.): j.mp/17Z5elf>•<Think on this a little while.>•< 1 hour ago
RT @AP: Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris evacuated after man puts letter on altar, fatally shoots himself in the head: apne.ws/191yaId …>•<Think on this a little while.>•< 1 hour ago
"The Global Consciousness Project, also known as the EGG Project, is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others continuously collecting data from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites worldwide. The archive contains over 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second."
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, January 13, 2013
Behold but one of the effects of climate change… the mighty Mississippi River going dry.
And really, why argue about what’s causing it when we need to be responding to the problems it creates?
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Initial Mississippi River Rock Removal Complete, Says Army
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said contractors have completed the first phase of emergency work to remove rocks that have held up barge traffic in the drought-stricken Mississippi River.
Contractors have excavated about 365 cubic yards (279 cubic meters) of limestone from the river near the town of Thebes in southern Illinois, deepening the channel by about two feet, the Corps said in a statement today.
About 18% of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion, the CDC noted. Factors from the availability of abortion providers, state laws, the general economy and access to health services including contraception, can Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Time and time again, the politicians in Alabama continue to prove the truth of that February 1, 1993, story Washington Post news story authored by reporter Michael Weisskopf which stated that followers of the Christian Right are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.”
By the time Governor Bentley and his GOP henchmen get through with Alabama, the only thing the citizens will need is a kiss.
The reason why, is that they’ll already have been screwed.
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Alabama is great for business, unless you’re in the business of being a kid
Published: Monday, October 22, 2012, 10:25 AM Updated: Monday, October 22, 2012, 1:04 PM
Only here in Alabama we sing it, like we sing most of our tunes, in our own peculiar way.
We believe that corporations are our future.
Seed them well and let them have their way.
As for the children? Well, to hell with them. They’re too little to make us any real cash, anyway. What good are they if they can’t produce jobs, jobs, jobs?
You see the reports and statistics all the time, rankings that paint Alabama as gloriously business friendly, with cheap labor costs, low corporate taxes and a government so eager to lure jobs it’s willing to toss in the barn when it gives away the family farm.
A development magazine this month ranked Alabama as the fourth-best state for business. And of course Alabamians cheered.
It’s a party hijacked by radicals – genuine radicals – whose solitary bent is the destruction of government. Tear down this, destroy & eliminate this, that and the other, shift responsibility to the states for various programs, knowing full well that they do not, and will not have the ability to fully or appropriately fund them because tax rates continue to decline… it’s a “Starve the Monster” approach which has been taken – quite literally.
We have experienced already the devastating effects of it – significant tax cuts and a 10-year long war which has driven up the deficit, a BIG BUSINESS Bailout resulting from financial deregulation, which has cost jobs, houses, increased homelessness & bankruptcies, and off-shoring of American manufacturing.
And all this is predicated – so they purport – to be symptomatic of “a welfare state” that rewards so-called “welfare queens” who have children precisely to obtain more welfare money (a genuine misnomer if ever there was one)
But the biggest question is: What’s for dessert?
I don’t think we want to know.
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FiveThirtyEight – Nate Silver’s Political Calculus
October 11, 2012, 6:24 pm
One recurring theme in the states we have profiled so far has been the exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party, yielding a striking transformation. The Solid South — so named for the regional hegemony of Democrats — has been reversed, and states that were once Democratic from top to bottom are becoming (or already are) equally Republican.
The evolution has progressed particularly far in the Deep South, but Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas are all at different stages.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, June 18, 2012
Slowly, but surely, the signs that our nation’s economy is improving are emerging.
They’re not rapid, they’re not massive, but they’re there.
And like a trickle that becomes a raging river, it’s beginning to rain.
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District employment increases modestly in May
06/18/2012
Payroll employment 6th district 1/11-5/11
The Sixth District as a whole added 9,000 jobs in May, following 9,600 new payrolls in April, and 18,900 in March, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Alabama, Florida, and Georgia recorded payrolls increases while Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee reported payroll decreases. Georgia was primarily responsible for the net positive District increase.
(Reuters) – The Jackson, Mississippi, school district has agreed to stop shackling students to fixed objects, after it was sued for handcuffing pupils to railings and poles at a school for troubled children, officials said on Friday.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Bowl Championship Series executive director Bill Hancock said the words that many college football fans have been waiting more than a decade to hear: “The BCS as we know it with the exact same policies will not continue.”
Hancock made the declaration at the end of a day of meetings of BCS leaders at a hotel in Hollywood, Fla., to negotiate possible new formats for when the BCS’s current TV contract expires after the January 2014 bowl games. College football’s 11 major-conference commissioners plus Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick will meet again Thursday and hope to release a shortlist of formats under consideration.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, March 12, 2012
Face it folks, Alabama MUST change its tax policy and law – something about which Alabamians have been warned for quite some time. It’s not as if we’ve never heard the idea or notion, for indeed, Alabama’s income tax assesses a heavier levy upon the poor than the wealthy, and many large corporate timberland-owners (Georgia Pacific, Weyerhauser, International Paper, Gulf States Paper, et al) pay little or nothing on their vast holdings by comparison to others.
As the issue of a potential shut-down of state services (the forensics lab in Huntsville) relates to criminal prosecution, I could imagine that a sharp attorney could move for dismissal of charges based upon delay of prosecution – which is a federal Constitutional issue – because the Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused the right to a speedy trial, among other aspects of prosecution.
And that issue – a violation of the Sixth Amendment – is one reason why I can imagine former UAH professor Amy Bishop – accused of murdering her colleagues – may have a federal case on her side, because the state of Alabama has virtually shut down all funding of public defense and defenders.
Just to remind the readers, the Sixth Amendment reads: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.“
And for those readers whom, for one reason or another, are not up to speed on the wranglings of Alabama politics, India Lynch vs. State of Alabama – the federal case in which Alabama’s tax policies were on trial – ended in October 2011, with a 854-page ruling in the state’s favor by His Honor, Judge Lynwood Smith in which existing tax structures & organization were found not to be unconstitutional. That story may be found here.
Alabama State Capitol Building, Montgomery, AL
The background: Alabama’s state income tax kicks in for families that earn as little a $4,600. Mississippi starts at over $19,000. Alabamians with incomes under $13,000 pay 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, while those who make over $229,000 pay just 4.1 percent. Alabama relies heavily on state sales tax, which runs as high as 11 percent and applies even to groceries and infant formula.
A primary reason Alabama’s poor pay so much is that large timber companies and megafarms pay so little. The state allows big landowners to value their land using ”current use” rules, which significantly underestimate its value. Then individuals are allowed to fully deduct the federal income taxes they pay from their state taxes, something few states allow, which is a boon for those in the top income brackets.
And while the GOP controls the Governor’s Office, State House & Senate and most all high-level state offices, there are no signs of progress toward equity or justice.
But read on to learn why…
Potential cuts for state forensics: ‘It’s going to impact everybody’s lives’
The evidence spans 18,000 different cases. And maybe by 2013, Lonnie Ginsberg hopes, the state will process most everything on those 12 shelves.
Maybe.
This is the uncertain world Ginsberg oversees in cash-strapped Alabama. The director of the Huntsville lab on Arcadia Circle, Ginsberg manages a complex he describes as overworked and understaffed – which is why some drugs confiscated by law enforcement may sit on a shelf for a year before being analyzed.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, May 16, 2011
The opening lyric to Hank Williams, Jr.‘s – aka “Bocephus” – 1982 song “A County Boy Can Survive,” is “And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry.”
At this juncture, that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case.
The Mississippi River has flooded to such an extent that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has decided to open floodgates and allow excess water from the river to flow toward the Gulf of Mexico through alternate routes.
Weeks of heavy rains and runoff from the melting of an extremely snowy winter have raised Mississippi River levels to historic proportions. Over 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of farmland in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas along the river have been flooded, evoking memories of floods in 1927 & ’37.
On Saturday, the Corps opened two of 125 floodgates at the Morganza Spillway, and opened two more today (Sunday, 15 May 2011). The spillway is 45 miles northwest of Louisiana’s capitol, Baton Rouge. The Corps hopes that by opening them, it will Read the rest of this entry »
