Whitman now leads Poizner, 38% to 29%, among likely voters with 30% undecided.
The Next Majority Leader The Washington Post looks beyond the fall election to the possible race for Senate majority leader — assuming Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) loses his re-election bid.
The main contenders are Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). “Each can boast a strength: Durbin has the pleasant demeanor of a consensus builder; Schumer is the diehard fighter who has never lost an election. The prospect of a Chicago vs. New York majority leader race with echoes of Obama vs. Clinton is tantalizing, but also distracting.”
Interesting fact: Schumer and Durbin have shared a Washington townhouse for years.
“Although Fiorina’s lead is within the 5-percentage-point margin of error, the poll highlights Campbell’s vulnerabilities as Election Day approaches: He is underfunded compared with Fiorina and under attack by conservatives unhappy with his moderate record on taxes and social issues.”
The revolt across the political landscape on Tuesday against incumbents wasn’t just an attack against the Washington establishment, but an outpouring of rage against political elites of all stripes who haven’t realized the economic crisis still gripping American workers. As Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, asks sensibly enough, “Why isn’t our […]
GOP Victory Mirage Almost six months ago I suggested that the conventional Washington wisdom of a Republican sweep this November was fatally flawed. Now a new AP-Gfk poll shows that the Democrats are staging a major comeback. People want Democrats to control Congress…
This Week in Bigotry This Week in Bigotry In an attempt to “rebrand” Arizona, whose recent immigration law has been called racist, Governor Jan Brewer bans teaching ethnic studies. After smearing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for having worked for civil rights icon Thurgood…
Costing $8 million, the Bullet 580 is the world’s largest blimp, measuring 71m long, and 19m in diameter. Able to be flown remotely or with a crew, you could rent it—for over $300,000 a month. More »
Rand Paul Not An Anomaly: More Fringe Tea Party Candidates Set To Knock Off Favored GOP Candidates Last night, fringe tea party Senate candidate Rand Paul (R-KY) sailed to victory in his primary over Trey Grayson, the GOP candidate favored by Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell and much of the Republican establishment. Not only did heavyweight Republicans like Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani stump for Grayson, but shadowy GOP front groups, like […]
Last night, fringe tea party Senate candidate Rand Paul (R-KY) sailed to victory in his primary over Trey Grayson, the GOP candidate favored by Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell and much of the Republican establishment. Not only did heavyweight Republicans like Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani stump for Grayson, but shadowy GOP front groups, like the American Future Fund — which casts itself as a tea party group — ran harsh attack ads hitting Paul. Paul’s success comes shortly after tea party candidates defeated incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) in the Utah primary, and tea party candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) forced Charlie Crist out of the Republican Party.
Republican operatives orchestrated the tea party movement to lay the foundation for Republican electoral gains. However, the far right tea parties have been uncontrollable, demanding that Republican candidates support extreme positions like eliminating Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Education, and even the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Paul’s success has already sent ripples throughout the GOP establishment, with other ramifications in Kentucky and for upcoming GOP primaries:
– Todd Lally, an extremist who has said that President Obama wouldn’t be able to get a security clearance, road Paul’s coattails to defeat the establishment-backed candidate Jeff Reetz in the primary for Kentucky’s third congressional district. Reetz is a Pizza Hut franchise owner who received financial support from the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC).
– Vauhn Ward, Sarah Palin endorsed Republican candidate in Idaho’s first congressional district, is quickly losing favor with the Republican primary voters. The tea party-backed candidate, State Rep. Raul Labrador, is surging in the polls against Ward. NRCC leaders like chairman Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has hosted a fundraiser for Ward.
– In Pennsylvania’s third district yesterday, voters chose tea party candidate Mike Kelly over NRCC-endorsed candidate Paul Huber.
– In the Colorado U.S. Senate race, far right tea party candidate Ken Buck is surging in the polls against Jane Norton, the longtime Republican politician chosen by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to run.
As ThinkProgress reported earlier this year, extreme tea party candidates have sought to purge Republican incumbents and handpicked GOP candidates in races all over the country.
Steele Says He Doesn?t Know Who The Republican ?Establishment? Is; Cavuto Responds: ?You, You, You!? Citing Rand Paul’s victory in the GOP Kentucky Senate primary against establishment choice Trey Grayson last night, Neil Cavuto asked RNC Chairman Michael Steele today about “dysfunction in the Republican Party” as the GOP establishment clashes with the Tea Party. Steele denied tension, saying he told the Tea Party in Kentucky that “if we have […]
Citing Rand Paul’s victory in the GOP Kentucky Senate primary against establishment choice Trey Grayson last night, Neil Cavuto asked RNC Chairman Michael Steele today about “dysfunction in the Republican Party” as the GOP establishment clashes with the Tea Party. Steele denied tension, saying he told the Tea Party in Kentucky that “if we have a situation where your guy prevails, we’re backing that candidate, we’re very much looking to supporting Rand and if our guy prevails, we’d like the same support.”
Cavuto responded that Tea Partiers had told him that they view the GOP establishment negatively, leading Steele to reply, “I’m telling you as the national chairman of the party there’s no bad blood between the Republican National Committee and the Tea Parties.” Cavuto persisted, however, in claiming that there was tension between the “establishment” and the Tea Party. Steele responded by saying that he didn’t even know who the Republican establishment is, leading Cavuto to note that Steele is the establishment:
CAVUTO: Michael, the Tea Partiers didn’t like Senator Bennett.
STEELE: That’s fine.
CAVUTO: Fairly or not, they didn’t like him. The established Republican Party did.
STEELE: Ok, that may be. But wait a minute.
CAVUTO: I’m just saying that for you to say there is no angst between the two…
STEELE: Neil, don’t mix. Please stop.
CAVUTO: There clearly is.
STEELE: Please do not mix the Republican Party establishment, I don’t know who that is, by the way.
CAVUTO: You, you, you!
STEELE: With activists, I, no…
CAVUTO: You, you, you, you, you.
STEELE: Neil, have you been reading my press lately, I don’t think the last thing you could say about me is that I’m part of the establishment.
CAVUTO: Well, that’s true because everybody hates you. I’m kidding.
Watch it:
Steele hasn’t always been so confused about the fact that he is part of the Republican establishment. In fact, in an interview with Cavuto earlier this year, Steele explained how he was part of the establishment and not the Tea Party. “As I like to tell people — long before there was this big push on tea parties — if I wasn’t doing this job, I’d be out there with the tea partiers,” said Steele. Steele has also said that he is “the de facto leader of the Republican Party.”
Voters’ anger at Washington may overpower any fixes Voters sent a clear message on Tuesday: They don’t like the way Washington works. But they sent a mixed message on what would make it work better, which adds up to a virtual guarantee that it might be a long time before Washington actually does work better.
K Street no longer the legendary hub of D.C. lobbying firms Several hundred demonstrators gathered for an “anti-K Street” protest Monday to “take on the corporate lobbyists who have a stranglehold on our democracy,” even shutting down traffic at the intersection of 14th and K NW.
The Texas Board of Education has 5 Democrats, and 10 Republicans, of which 7 vote as a conservative block.
What does that mean? They control what happens here.
While liberals yesterday packed the hearing room, held news conferences, and shouted ‘don’t indoctrinate, just educate’ and ‘get your hands off our textbooks, leave it to the experts’, sources here say 10 years ago, when Democrats enjoyed an identical majority, they too manipulated the curriculum to fit their agenda.
The debate began when a teacher review group of teachers recommended replacing Christmas with a Hindu holiday and removing partially or entirely Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, religious references, and Christopher Columbus.
There are two sets of changes sought by conservatives.
Board Member Don McLeroy will address the below ideas at the meeting:
1. Contrast what the Founding Fathers meant by separation of church and state vs. how it is practiced by government today
2. Analyze the cause and effect of eugenics: Early in the 20th Century, 60,000 poor and mostly minority Americans were sterilized against their will because they were considered genetically inferior…
3. Evaluate efforts by the United Nations to undermine U.S. sovereignty including a gun ban and the redistribution of American wealth
4. Discuss the fiscal health of Social Security and Medicare
5. Discuss government abuse of property rights and the taking of land w/o compensation – and the adverse impact of affirmative action on when more qualified workers are passed over by minority applicants
Liberals say changes eliminate academic freedom and overplay Biblical values. While, conservatives say this is just an attempt to bring balance back to curriculum that liberals hijacked years ago.
April was a dry month for life sciences news, but May has been roaring with Halozyme’s product recall, Pathway Genomics’ aborted sales plan, and funding news—lots of funding news. Your Xconomy life sciences briefing begins now.
—Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless and Scripps Research Institute colleague M.B. Finn told Luke they’re encouraged by the increased attention they’re getting for their work on “click” chemistry. By combining combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening, and building chemical libraries of molecular building blocks, they say click chemistry can be used to speed up drug discoveries by making multistep synthesis fast, efficient, and predictable.
The American cyclist Floyd Landis, stripped of the title in 2006 Tour de France for failing a doping test, has sent a series of emails to international referees and sponsors. The former rider admitted the systematic use of prohibited performance-enhancing substances.
The information provided on Thursday by the Wall Street Journal, says Landis sent three e-mails to seven people, including international referees and sponsors, which refers to the inability of international groups to eliminate doping.
Landis accuses directly Belgian Johan Bruyneel for explaining him in 2002 and 2003, his early years in the U.S. Postal, how to use routinely steroids, synthetic EPO, growth hormone and transfusion practice undetectable in controls.
Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer and Dave Zabriskie appear in three emails. Landis explained how after his hip surgery in 2003 flew to Gerona, where they extracted two and a half liters of blood in three weeks, an amount that would be reused during the Tour de France. The extraction, Landis says, was conducted in Armstrong’s apartment. The bags, including Armstrong’s and Hincapie’s, were kept in a refrigerator and Landis was responsible for controlling the temperature daily.
Landis explains that in moving to Phonak in 2006, told the Swiss owner of the training, Andy Rihs, his desire to continue the program of doping conducted at the U.S. Postal, and he agreed.
Landis spent two years and more than two million dollars to defend against the charges brought against him. Today, like other repentant, has decided to collaborate with the authorities. During the last cyclist has cooperated with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which has provided information about Armstrong and other cyclists, reports the New York Times. Federal agent Jeff Novitzky, a leader of the operation tip BALCO laboratory in San Francisco, is among the leaders of the investigation.
In the first day of the Google I/O 2010 developer conference, Google unveiled WebM, a new open and free video format aimed at solving the HTML5 video-codec debate. We’ve already covered the details of the WebM Project, the coalition of companies that support the new format, which includes Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and many ot… (read more)
Technology Review has an article on “devices that make ice at night to replace air-conditioning during times of peak power demand” – Using Ice to Cool Down the Grid.
Over the next few weeks, a consortium of municipal utilities in California will begin retrofitting government offices and commercial properties with systems that use ice made at night to replace air-conditioning during the day. It’s part of a pilot program for the devices, which are built by Windsor, CO-based Ice Energy. If widely deployed, they could reduce fuel consumption by utilities by up to 30 percent and put off the need for new power plants.
The first devices will be installed on about two dozen city-owned buildings in Glendale, CA, under the plan being coordinated by the Southern California Public Power Authority. Over the next two years, the 11 participating utilities will install 1,500 of the devices, providing a total of 53 megawatts of energy storage to relieve strain on the region’s electrical grid. The project is the first large-scale implementation of Ice Energy’s technology.
Each Ice Energy device is designed to make ice overnight, when demand for electricity is low, using a high-efficiency compressor to freeze 450 gallons of water. Around midday, the cooling mode kicks in, and the device shuts off the building’s regular air conditioner for a six-hour cycle. It pipes a stream of coolant from the slowly melting block of ice to an evaporator coil installed within the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning blower system. Once the ice is melted, the air conditioner returns to normal operation. Brian Parsonnet, Ice Energy’s chief technology officer, says the Ice Bear can cut a building’s power consumption by 95 percent during peak hours on the hottest days.
Cutting demand for electricity during peak hours reduces the need to build new power plants. It also allows utilities to rely on their most efficient power plants, says Ronald Domitrovic, a senior project manager for electric utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute. He says that when utilities fire up their “least efficient, oldest, and least desirable” generating resources to meet peak demand, every increment of increased power on the grid sends costs surging, whether one is talking fuel costs, greenhouse gas emissions, or service reliability. However, at night, utilities draw on their most efficient power plants, which use less fuel than power plants used only during peak hours. The utility also saves energy at other points in the grid–for example, cooler power lines at night transmit electricity more efficiently.
Domitrovic says systems that use ice or cold water on a large scale to provide cooling for campuses and large buildings have “been around for some time.” But he says these are usually “expensive one-off units, designed specifically for the building,” and that the smaller modular thermal storage systems that Ice Energy provides “can be deployed with relative simplicity” to serve one- or two-story commercial buildings. Ice Energy says that cooling units housed at distributed sites can be networked, presenting utilities with a resource that can be dispatched as needed to help manage demand on the grid.
The Jonas Brothers have invited David and Victoria Beckham’s three sons to appear in their new video, The Sun said Wednesday.
Brooklyn, Romeo, and Cruz Beckham met the pop stars at a concert in Los Angeles last weekend, after the boys watched their live show from a balcony with parents David and Victoria. The Jonases took such a liking to their fellow bro trio that they offered the kids a cameo in their next vid.
“Kevin, Joe and Nick were really pleased to meet the Beckhams and they invited the children to be “The younger ones were really excited about it but Brooklyn decided to play it a bit cooler,” a spy whispers.
… domestic chickens diverged from red junglefowl 58,000±16,000 years ago, well before the archeological dating of domestication, and that their common ancestor in turn diverged from green junglefowl 3.6 million years ago. Several shared haplotypes nonetheless found between green junglefowl and chickens are attributed to recent unidirectional introgression of chickens into green junglefowl. Shared haplotypes are more frequently found between red junglefowl and chickens, which are attributed to both introgression and ancestral polymorphisms. Within each chicken breed, there is an excess of homozygosity, but there is no significant reduction in the nucleotide diversity. Phenotypic modifications of chicken breeds as a result of artificial selection appear to stem from ancestral polymorphisms at a limited number of genetic loci.
I wonder if domesticates in particular exhibit these more complex reticulated patterns in their phylogenies because they spread along human trade routes.
A novel drill that is inspired by a jet engine and uses super-heated water to carve through rock could help make clean energy from underground rocks more economically viable, according to its backers at Google.
Potter Drilling is part-funded by Google.org – the internet search giant’s philanthropic arm – and wants to use its technology to develop geothermal energy, which involves tapping the energy from hot rocks deep in the Earth.
Geothermal energy is seen by environmentalists as a vast potential source of clean, carbon-free energy if it can be tapped efficiently. Traditional methods drill into the Earth and use naturally occurring underground pockets of steam or hot water in order to make clean electricity.
A report (pdf) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that tapping just 2% of the potential resource from so-called enhanced geothermal systems between 3km and 10km below the surface of continental USA could supply more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.
Geothermal projects in countries from Australia to Iceland and Germany already generate thousands of megawatts of electricity. Geothermal power plants can be used as baseload electricity because they are usually productive for more than 90% of the time, compared with 65%-75% for fossil-fuel power plants. They also produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions.
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) allow the traditional techniques to be applied almost anywhere. By drilling deep into the Earth (where rock temperatures can reach more than 200C) and pumping water into the hole, the underground hot rocks fracture, thus allowing the water to circulate and heat up. The hot water comes back to the surface and is then used to drive turbines and produce electricity.
“EGS could be the killer app of the energy world,” said Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google.org, when its funding was first announced for Potter Drilling. “One of the attractive aspects is that it’s baseload, it’s 24-hour power and that’s a nice complement to solar and wind, which are intermittent sources. If you can put all three of these technologies together, we’re going to have a much more attractive green electricity mix.”
Description: It took me 2 weeks to design this Stolmen DJ Studio. I have downloaded the tool from IKEA site and used it to design and visualize what I’ve wanted.
1. I installed 4 STOLMEN Post without drilling.
2. I place the EXPEDIT Shelving unit with all my Vinyl Records.
3. I installed the STOLMEN Shelves 1 on top of the EXPEDIT shelving unit then the others.
4. I installed the STOLMEN Shoe Rack to use for MacBook Pro.
5. I installed all 4 LACK Shelves and screwed the sides of the LACK Shelves on the STOLMEN mounting fixture to give more stable support.
6. I installed 2 metal plates on the wall and hooked the KOMPLEMENT shoe rack (Slanted) on top of Rack shelf (For Mic Mixer and Trigger Finger).
7. I installed the STOLMEN hook to hang Headphones.
8. Finally, I installed all DJ gears , PC and accessories, I used SIGNUM cable organizer and Velcro to organize power supply and cables.
As a response to the most recent privacy backlash, Facebook head of public policy Tim Sparapani announced in a radio show that the company would be offering users some new and more ‘simplistic’ privacy options within the following weeks. He said that this decision was caused by the fact that users had complained that the social network has become quite… (read more)
All of which are COMPLETELY outweighed by the one reason you would. Bro Bible here lists 10 reasons (from Megan herself) that we wouldn’t want to date Megan Fox.
Sorry Megan, still want to bang you like a kettle drum.
While Toyota has recently suffered from image problems and missed and late recalls on several of their models, but the Europe-only Auris Hybrid hatchback that will hit the UK market in July could help recoup their image.
The Auris hybrid will come in two models, the Hybrid T4 and Hybrid T Spirit, both featuring Hybrid Synergy Drive Technology and will be priced at £18,950 and £20,700 respectively.
Built at Toyota’s Burnaston plant, it uses the same body shell as the traditional Auris hatch and features two electric motors and a 1.8 litre VVT-i petrol engine. The Auris HSD has four driving modes, including zero-emisisons EV mode, that are optimised for different driving conditions with CO2 emissions as low as 89g/km, and will offer an economy potential up to 74.3mpg on the official combined driving cycle.
Last night, 
In the first day of the Google I/O 2010 developer conference, Google unveiled WebM, a new open and free video format aimed at solving the HTML5 video-codec debate. We’ve already covered the details of the WebM Project, the coalition of companies that support the new format, which includes Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and many ot… (
As a response to the most recent privacy backlash, Facebook head of public policy Tim Sparapani announced in a radio show that the company would be offering users some new and more ‘simplistic’ privacy options within the following weeks. He said that this decision was caused by the fact that users had complained that the social network has become quite… (
