Bryan Fischer, the public face of the American Family Association, said yesterday that the government should mandate that all Americans go to church or otherwise be taxed for “endangering their physical health.”

“People who have an active vibrant spiritual life are healthier. They live longer, they are healthier, and they are happier. Their physical health is better. What we ought to do is we ought to have an individual mandate from the government that everybody has to go to church because, after all, Obamacare is all about improving the health of the American people. We know that going to church is good for you, it’s good for your health, so we are going to mandate that you go to Church for your own health… and we are going to tax the athiests who don’t go to church. Now, we can’t make you go to church, but we are going to penalize you if you don’t. We’re gonna assess a tax on every atheist that doesn’t go to church because those atheists are endangering their physical health.

http://americount.org/2012/07/06/american-family-associations-bryan-fischer-government-mandate-americans-attend-church-taxed/


The Crazy

When Duke Energy announced its merger with Progress Energy last year, the two companies agreed that Progress CEO Bill Johnson would assume the same position at the combined company. So he did: On June 27, Johnson signed a three-year contract to helm Duke. When the merger went into effect on July 2, he assumed the position of CEO.

And then, on July 3 at midnight, Johnson resigned. The Wall Street Journal:

Outsiders considered the turn of events highly unusual. New chief executives almost never quit days after accepting an employment contract, three executive-compensation consultants said.

It “is very odd” for a CEO to exit days after taking command, said David Schmidt, a consultant at James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm in New York that wasn’t involved with either company. “I have never seen that before.”

But let us not weep for our once and not-future king. Bill Johnson’s golden parachute was not affected by his short flight.

Despite his short-lived tenure, Mr. Johnson will receive exit payments worth as much as $44.4 million, according to Duke. That includes $7.4 million in severance, a nearly $1.4 million cash bonus, a special lump-sum payment worth up to $1.5 million and accelerated vesting of his stock awards, according to a Duke regulatory filing Tuesday night. Mr. Johnson gets the lump-sum payment as long as he cooperates with Duke and doesn’t disparage his former employer, the filing said.

Under his exit package, Mr. Johnson also will receive approximately $30,000 to reimburse him for relocation expenses.



http://grist.org/news/duke-ceo-bill-johnson-resigns-after-one-day-gets-44-million-in-severance/

After a bad couple of weeks clunkily extracting Ann Curry as co-host of its morning infotainment show, NBC News found itself dealing with another unpleasant personnel report this week: David Gregory is on his way out as host of the network’s Sunday Beltway show, “Meet the Press.”

This week, the iPad news service The Daily ran a report that Gregory was right behind Curry in the NBC News Tumbril.

The report about Gregory is not new — it surfaced a couple of months ago (at that time, Joe Scarborough was said to be his replacement). But stone-cold denials were issued by “Meet the Press” exec producer Betsy Fischer and NBC News President Steve Capus.

Another stone-cold denial was issued this week: “The rumors recklessly reported by The Daily are categorically untrue,” NBC News said in a statement. That, even though this time, The Daily reported that “Meet the Press” anchor Tim Russert was spinning in his grave over the show’s numbers. Russert ruled the Sunday Beltway show ratings until his sudden death in June of 2008.

Last month, “Meet the Press’s” weekly rating hit a 20-year low among viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 — the currency of news programming.

On the first Sunday of June, the public-affairs show averaged 2.46 million total viewers of all ages — but just 687,000 viewers in that key age bracket — which was its smallest 25-to-54 demographic performance for a regular broadcast since July of ’92. “Meet the Press” got beat in the demographic by ABC News’s “This Week” that week — the first time it bested both Gregory’s show and CBS’s “Face the Nation” in two years.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/nbc-news-execs-deny-david-gregory-is-out-at-meet-the-press/2012/07/05/gJQATBTLQW_blog.html


It should be replaced by info commercials from the republican party and oil companies.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) today named NRCC Finance Chairman Vern Buchanan (FL-16) as the “Corrupt Republican of the Month” after a new CNN report found that investigations into Buchanan “could result in Buchanan serving his next term behind bars.” The FBI, the IRS, the House Ethics Committee and a federal Grand Jury continue to investigate Congressman Buchanan for his alleged roles in a scheme to funnel corporate money into his campaign coffers, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Congressman Buchanan is now scheduled to testify under oath this month.
While Congressman Buchanan is under investigation for his campaign finance schemes, he remains the chief of fundraising for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
“The investigations into Congressman Buchanan are getting more serious by the day – the FBI, IRS, House Ethics and a federal Grand Jury investigating campaign fundraising schemes, tax evasion and witness tampering,” said Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “House Republicans said they’d have a zero tolerance policy on ethics, but it turns out that every dollar they’re re-election effort is raising comes from a corrupt fundraiser. For being so corrupt that CNN recently reported he could end up ‘behind bars,’ Congressman Vern Buchanan is named Corruption Republican of the Month.”


Republican Leaders pledged a “zero-tolerance” policy on ethics and recently NRCC Chairman Pete Session said it was important “every single Republican” has “high character value,” but they have stood behind their scandal-plagued Members including Congressman Buchanan. HouseOfScandal.com is a clearinghouse for voters to get information about the growing list of Republican Members facing ethics scandals and corruption.

Each month a House Republican is named “Corrupt Republican of the Month” which currently features other Florida House Republicans including David Rivera and Cliff Stearns in addition to other Republicans across the nation facing ethics scandals.

http://dccc.org/blog/entry/congressman_vern_buchanan_named_as_corrupt_republican_of_the_month/

Signed agreement stating DoJ will not prosecute Barclay's criminally for LIBOR manipulation, LIEBORGATE








http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/documents/Barclaysagreement.pdf

Banks across the world were fixing interest rates in the run-up to the financial crisis but regulators failed to take action to stop it, the former head of Barclays claimed yesterday.

Giving evidence to Parliament Bob Diamond said Barclays had raised the issue of banks ‘under-reporting’ the true amount they were having to pay to borrow money but were ignored.

He declined to say that the regulators “were asleep at the wheel” but added: “There was an issue out there. (It) should have been dealt with”.

But Mr Diamond denied that the Bank of England told him specifically to ‘fix’ interest rates during a phone conversation during October 2008.

He told the Treasury Select Committee he “didn't believe” he had “received an instruction” from Deputy Governor Paul Tucker about the fixing of interest rates.



Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/uk/bob-diamond-banks-across-the-world-were-fixing-interest-rates-in-runup-to-the-financial-crisis-16181211.html#ixzz1zjgNdUcn


&feature=player_embedded#!

Matt Taibbi explains how the banking cartel is manipulating global interest rates.

Source: Nature

Direct measurement of a dark-matter ‘filament’ confirms its existence in a galaxy supercluster.



A ‘finger’ of the Universe’s dark-matter skeleton, which ultimately dictates where galaxies form, has been observed for the first time. Researchers have directly detected a slim bridge of dark matter joining two clusters of galaxies, using a technique that could eventually help astrophysicists to understand the structure of the Universe and identify what makes up the mysterious invisible substance known as dark matter.

According to the standard model of cosmology, visible stars and galaxies trace a pattern across the sky known as the cosmic web, which was originally etched out by dark matter — the substance thought to account for almost 80% of the Universe’s matter. Soon after the Big Bang, regions that were slightly denser than others pulled in dark matter, which clumped together and eventually collapsed into flat ‘pancakes’. “Where these pancakes intersect, you get long strands of dark matter, or filaments,” explains Jörg Dietrich, a cosmologist at the University Observatory Munich in Germany. Clusters of galaxies then formed at the nodes of the cosmic web, where these filaments crossed.

The presence of dark matter is usually inferred by the way its strong gravity bends light travelling from distant galaxies that lie behind it — distorting their apparent shapes as seen by telescopes on Earth. But it is difficult to observe this 'gravitational lensing' by dark matter in filaments because they contain relatively little mass.

Dietrich and his colleagues got around this problem by studying a particularly massive filament, 18 megaparsecs long, that bridges the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. Luckily, this dark bridge is oriented so that most of its mass lies along the line of sight to Earth, enhancing the lensing effect, explains Dietrich. The team examined the distortion of more than 40,000 background galaxies, and calculated that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 1013 and 9.8 × 1013 times the mass of the Sun. Their results are reported in Nature today1.


Read more: http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951

Source: Nature

Direct measurement of a dark-matter ‘filament’ confirms its existence in a galaxy supercluster.



A ‘finger’ of the Universe’s dark-matter skeleton, which ultimately dictates where galaxies form, has been observed for the first time. Researchers have directly detected a slim bridge of dark matter joining two clusters of galaxies, using a technique that could eventually help astrophysicists to understand the structure of the Universe and identify what makes up the mysterious invisible substance known as dark matter.

According to the standard model of cosmology, visible stars and galaxies trace a pattern across the sky known as the cosmic web, which was originally etched out by dark matter — the substance thought to account for almost 80% of the Universe’s matter. Soon after the Big Bang, regions that were slightly denser than others pulled in dark matter, which clumped together and eventually collapsed into flat ‘pancakes’. “Where these pancakes intersect, you get long strands of dark matter, or filaments,” explains Jörg Dietrich, a cosmologist at the University Observatory Munich in Germany. Clusters of galaxies then formed at the nodes of the cosmic web, where these filaments crossed.

The presence of dark matter is usually inferred by the way its strong gravity bends light travelling from distant galaxies that lie behind it — distorting their apparent shapes as seen by telescopes on Earth. But it is difficult to observe this 'gravitational lensing' by dark matter in filaments because they contain relatively little mass.

Dietrich and his colleagues got around this problem by studying a particularly massive filament, 18 megaparsecs long, that bridges the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. Luckily, this dark bridge is oriented so that most of its mass lies along the line of sight to Earth, enhancing the lensing effect, explains Dietrich. The team examined the distortion of more than 40,000 background galaxies, and calculated that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 1013 and 9.8 × 1013 times the mass of the Sun. Their results are reported in Nature today1.


Read more: http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951

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This is a big deal... and Nature doesn't post crap