June 17, 2012

-Toon- ...If you have moral objections to something, you shouldn't have to pay for it

Oh Hell Yeah!

June 16, 2012

Luckovich Toon- Campaign Finance

June 16, 2012

Toon- Amended 'Stop and Frisk' Proceedures

June 16, 2012

Toon- Border signs

June 16, 2012

FCC proposes first cellphone radiation investigation in 15 years

Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Julius Genachowski released a proposal on Friday to formally investigate whether wireless radiation is carcinogenic and should thus be regulated more strictly.

If the proposal is approved by a majority of the FCC's four other commissioners, the inquiry will move forward with an investigation of existing cellular radiation regulations as well as whether wireless devices used by children should carry be subject to higher standards, reports The Wall Street Journal. It has been 15 years since the commission last examined the issue.

A number of independent studies have raised concern over wireless radiation emission and its possible role in causing brain tumors, though a lack of conclusive evidence has kept the debate from being resolved. The proposed inquiry is not meant to put these questions to bed and an FCC official said that the agency has no plans to create new rules based on any possible findings.

"The great weight of the most credible scientific evidence tells us there is no causal link between cellphone usage and brain tumors," said FCC commissioner Robert McDowell (R-Va.). "Nonetheless, it is prudent to reassess our methodology and procedures from time to time, provided we don't cause unwarranted concern among cellphone consumers along the way."


http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/15/fcc_proposes_first_cellphone_radiation_investigation_in_15_years.html

June 16, 2012

Chevrolet Volt Outselling Corvette in 2012

Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid sedan is in its first year of full production, and after six months of sales, the Volt has toppled the Chevy Corvette in the retail race.

So far in 2012, Chevy has offloaded 7,057 Volts, compared to the the Corvette’s 5,547 sales. It deserves noting that the figures General Motors — Chevrolet’s parent company — has released are for deliveries to dealers, and not vehicles parked in customer garages.

Still, the duality of the two vehicles sold under the same marque couldn’t be more clear. Both the Corvette and Volt could be considered niche products — one a sports car, one a plug-in hybrid with a 40-mile range and absolutely no sporting pretenses.

There’s also the price discrepancy — not that anyone is cross-shopping the two models. The Volt comes in at $39,995 before any state or federal incentives, while the Corvette starts at just over 50 large. And of course, the fuel economy of both models stands in stark contrast: The Volt gets a combined rating of 94 MPGe, while the ‘Vette and its 6.2-liter V8 manages to eek out 16 MPG in the city and 26 MPG on the highway.


more

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/06/volt-v-vette/

June 16, 2012

Will Congress compound its error on ‘highly qualified’ teachers?

By Valerie Strauss
Back in late 2010, Congress approved legislation that defined “highly qualified teachers” as including students still in teacher training programs. Now, instead of admitting that the definition doesn’t make much sense, Congress is on the road to passing new legislation to keep that definition on the books (even though a federal appellate court has ruled that it violates the No Child Left Behind law).

This week, and possibly as early as today, a Senate subcommittee is taking up an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — known in its current form as No Child Left Behind — that deals with this issue.

Under NCLB, all children are supposed to have highly qualified teachers. School districts are supposed to let parents know which teachers are not highly qualified, and they are supposed to be equitably distributed in schools. But they aren’t.

In fact, teachers still in training programs are disproportionately concentrated in schools serving low-income students and students of color, the very children who need the very best the teaching profession has to offer. And the inequitable distribution of these teachers has a disproportionate impact on students with disabilities.

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/will-congress-compound-its-error-on-highly-qualified-teachers/2012/06/11/gJQAAT8HWV_blog.html

June 16, 2012

Kaiser Permanente: We’ll be ready for the inevitable climate-change-based downfall of society

From Bloomberg News:

“One of the largest health care providers” glosses over it a little bit. Kaiser has over 180,000 employees — 16,000 of whom are physicians — and 8.8 million members. In short, Kaiser is an institution that rivals New York City in scale with a history rooted in tackling social issues; the company evolved from an informal association aimed at providing health insurance to shipbuilders in Oakland.

Kaiser’s climate change efforts are ones you might predict: increased energy efficiency, carbon offsets, and generating its own power, including 11 megawatts of solar. More interesting is how Kaiser anticipates climate change will impact public health.






more
http://grist.org/news/kaiser-permanente-well-be-ready-for-the-inevitable-climate-change-based-downfall-of-society/

June 16, 2012

Closer Look Shows Way More US Solar Power

by Pete Danko
There’s no better source for data on energy than the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy. But when it comes to solar energy and how much of it is being generated annually, the EIA is apparently out to lunch.

According to Michael Mendelsohn, a market and policy impact analyst at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, EIA misses not just some but the majority of solar energy generated. How can this be?

Mendelsohn said in a blog post that it’s because “the agency’s numbers only capture facilities over 1 megwawatt (MW), and even then, likely miss production as system owners may not know of their obligation to report this information.”

That’s right: EIA statistic don’t include all the power coming from the thousands and thousands of small systems people have installed on their roofs in recent years, nor from the fairly big systems that have gone in on warehouses and business and maybe even some of the larger systems that are supposed to be part of the data.
more
http://www.earthtechling.com/2012/06/closer-look-shows-way-more-us-solar-than-we-thought/

June 16, 2012

1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible

by Elizabeth Wurtzel
NEW YORK -- When my mind gets stuck on everything that is wrong with feminism, it brings out the 19th century poet in me: Let me count the ways. Most of all, feminism is pretty much a nice girl who really, really wants so badly to be liked by everybody -- ladies who lunch, men who hate women, all the morons who demand choice and don't understand responsibility -- that it has become the easy lay of social movements. I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time -- by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits -- is her feminist choice. Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it? The whole point to begin with was that women were losing their minds pushing mops and strollers all day without a room or a salary of their own.

Let's please be serious grown-ups: real feminists don't depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.

If the movement had been serious about being serious then the idea could not have caught on that equal is how you feel. Or that how anyone feels about anything matters at all. Men know better. They look at numbers, and here is how the statistics are running years after women first started screaming and yelling and burning bras: We still earn 81 percent of what men do, and an act to make things more fair was blocked in Congress by Republicans. For anyone who doesn't care to count, but understands traffic signals mixed with policy speculation, I think it's safe to say that the day is near when a teenage girl will be forced to get a vaginal probe before she is issued a learner's permit in the state of Virginia. And this is all because feminism has misread its mission of equality as something open to interpretation, as expressive and impressive, not absolute.

Don't agree? Try this: smart is how you feel, pretty is how you feel, talented is how you feel -- we are all beautiful geniuses. Feminism should not be inclusive, and like most terms that are meaningful, it should mean something. It should mean equality.

more

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/1-percent-wives-are-helping-to-kill-feminism-and-make-the-war-on-women-possible/258431/