Republicans have a different understanding of the meaning of English words than I do. Scott Walker in Wisconsin:
To help close the state’s $283 million budget
shortfall this year, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) plans to skip a
$108 million debt payment scheduled for May.
Walker, a likely presidential candidate whose campaign message rooted in
Wisconsin’s fiscal record, has been struggling to balance the budget in
his home state before the June 30 deadline. Pushing off debt payments
is one tactic that he and predecessors have used in the past.
By
missing the May payment, Walker will incur about $1.1 million in
additional interest fees between 2015 and 2017. The $108 million debt
will continue to live on the books; Walker’s budget proposal for
2015-2017 will pay down no more than about $18 million of the principal...
Democrats have been pressuring Walker to address
the estimated $283 million shortfall with an emergency budget bill, but
he has resisted so far. Restructuring this kind of debt does not require
legislative sign-off. Walker may also be forced to make emergency
government spending cuts in the next four months to make ends meet.
In
March last year, Walker signed a $541 million tax cut for both families
and businesses. At that point, Wisconsin was facing a $1 billion budget
surplus through June 2015, the Journal Sentinel reported.
By
November last year, the administration was estimating a $132 million
shortfall. In January, the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau pegged it
at $283 million. The Bureau, which does research for the Wisconsin
Legislature, explained that tax collections were $173 million worse than
the administration’s own estimates in November.
Trickle-down economics is such bullshit. So is the belief that Republicans can govern responsibly.
The New Yorker has a long article on the likely involvement of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in the disappearing of Jean McConville. Mark Ames replies to the article here. With a Dail election possible this fall, and Sinn Fein currently leading some polls, expect more similar stories ahead. From spokesman for terrorists (and [almost certainly] brigade commander in the I.R.A.) in the 6 counties to Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland? That would be one of the stranger consequences of the Great Recession/European Depression.
Most of the foot traffic was heading in one direction, but then two
teenage girls came toward us, moving stiffly against the flow, both of
them looking nervously to their right. “He’s got a gun,” one of them
said in a low voice.
I turned my gaze to follow theirs, and was
clasping my 4-year-old daughter’s hand when a young man extended his arm
and fired off multiple shots along the busy street running parallel to
the boardwalk. Snatching my daughter up into my arms, I joined the
throng of screaming revelers running away from the gunfire and toward
the water.
The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man
disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I
tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all
looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on
Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family
for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.
“Someone was just shooting on the beach,” she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.
Unable
to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her,
somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety
before calling her mom.
“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”
My
friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults,
we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had
thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.
We
also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us
had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros
and cons.
As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The
shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second
or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks.
It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even
physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how
quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed
in the back of a squad car. Some of us knew of black professionals who’d
had guns drawn on them for no reason.
This was before Michael Brown.
I know tons of white people who would freak out on the cops if they were regularly treated as blacks are in New York City, St. Louis County and myriad other cities and towns throughout the United States. Most of them would say otherwise, but they just can't imagine what it's like for black folks daily. Reading this article might give them a little bit of insight into it.
What distinguishes pi from all other numbers is its
connection to cycles. For those of us interested in the applications of
mathematics to the real world, this makes pi indispensable. Whenever we
think about rhythms—processes that repeat periodically, with a fixed
tempo, like a pulsing heart or a planet orbiting the sun—we inevitably
encounter pi. There it is in the formula for a Fourier series: That series is an all-encompassing representation of any process, x(t), that repeats every T
units of time. The building blocks of the formula are pi and the sine
and cosine functions from trigonometry. Through the Fourier series, pi
appears in the math that describes the gentle breathing of a baby and
the circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness that govern our bodies.
When structural engineers need to design buildings to withstand
earthquakes, pi always shows up in their calculations. Pi is inescapable
because cycles are the temporal cousins of circles; they are to time as
circles are to space. Pi is at the heart of both.
For
this reason, pi is intimately associated with waves, from the ebb and
flow of the ocean’s tides to the electromagnetic waves that let us
communicate wirelessly. At a deeper level, pi appears in both the
statement of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the Schrödinger wave
equation, which capture the fundamental behavior of atoms and subatomic
particles. In short, pi is woven into our descriptions of the innermost
workings of the universe.
Even though I don't understand all that, I know it is really cool.
On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up
— Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at
37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that
you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign
he told voters
that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would
soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter
to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars”
because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program
to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had
bragged about, but that’s another story).
While in the House in 2013, Cotton introduced an amendment
to prosecute the relatives of those who violated sanctions on Iran,
saying that his proposed penalties of up to 20 years in prison would
“include a spouse and any relative to the third degree,” including
“parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great
grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids.” Forget about the fact that
the Constitution expressly prohibits “corruption of blood” penalties —
just consider that Cotton wanted to take someone who had violated
sanctions and imprison their grandchildren. Needless to say, this deranged piece of legislation was too much even for Republicans to stomach, and it went nowhere.
Some States Fight To Keep Their Wood Fires Burning - McClatchy. Maybe the legislators ought to read the regulations so they understand them (or, being Republican, have somebody read the regulations to them). They apply to manufacturers and newly purchased wood stoves. And many stoves have met the requirements for years (and have been working with EPA). But, hey, EPA is evil.
