Tag Archives: Million

News

Obama’s federal aid overwhelmingly given to Democrat-supporting counties

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USA Today reports. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

Billions of dollars in federal aid delivered directly to the local level to help revive the economy have gone overwhelmingly to places that supported President Obama in last year’s presidential election.

That aid — about $17 billion — is the first piece of the administration’s massive stimulus package that can be tracked locally. Much of it has followed a well-worn path to places that regularly collect a bigger share of federal grants and contracts, guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation.

“There’s no politics at work when it comes to spending for the recovery,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says.

Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.

The reports show the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34.

This reminds of Obama’s doings in Chicago.

$18 Million Dollar Contract goes to Democrat-supporting IT firm

David Freddoso broke a story today about an $18 million dollar IT contract awarded to a firm that donates exclusively to Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. (H/T Hot Air)

Here is an excerpt from the Washington Examiner story:

ABC reports this morning that the Maryland firm Smartronix has won what seems like an enormous $18 million contract to re-design the Recovery.gov website. Approximately $9.5 million would be spent by January in order to make “Recovery 2.0” out of the site that is supposed to track the spending of federal stimulus funds in detail.

Smartronix, a medium-sized Maryland-based firm (over 500 employees) founded in 1995, boasts a large number of government clients, mostly military. The company appears to have just one important political connection: according to FEC records, Smartronix president, Mohammed Javaid, vice president Alan Parris, and partner John Parris have together given $19,000 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D) since 1999. There is no record of a Smartronix employee contributing to any other federal politician.

UPDATE: Smartronix got $260 million in other federal contracts

Smartronix has received more than $260 million in federal contracts since the year 2000, with the top awarding agencies being the U.S. Navy, Federal Technology Service, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Minerals Management Service, and the Office of Policy, Management and Budget (not clear which department or agency issued this contract), according to USASpending.gov.

Nearly $180 million of the contracts awarded to Smartronix during the period 2000-2009 were awarded on less-than-competitive basis, including $21 million for non-competitive awards. Another $33 million was awarded in competitive processes in which Smartronix was the sole bidder.

And one of my co-workers noticed that this even got posted on SlashDot with 341 comments so far!

The Republican response

House Republicans released this new ad about the staggering 9.5% unemployment rate.

H/T Gateway Pundit.

News

Democrat Waxman believes that opposing Obama’s energy tax is equivalent to opposing America

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Check out this Politico.com post. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has had an eventful couple of weeks to say the least, believes House Republican opposition to climate change legislation and the stimulus indicates they’re cheering against the good ol’ US of A.

“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman told WAMU radio host Diane Rehm on Tuesday morning, promoting his new book, “The Waxman Report.”

All the lies they spoke about that Christian fascist Bush was just so much projection, foreshadowing how they themselves would deal with “unpatriotic” dissent.

Al Gore and Goldman Sachs

In a related story, repeat college drop-out Al Gore (NOT A SCIENTIST) equated his war on global warming to the war against Nazism.(H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

…Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.”

And he has good reason to do so, given that his personal fortune has skyrocketed from $2 million to over $100 million. Oh, don’t let those tolerant Democrats fool you. If you oppose their greed and lust for power, then you’re worse than Satan. How dare you assert your rights to liberty and prosperity against the power of their oligarchy?

And he isn’t the only one who is ready to cash in. The employees of investment firm Goldman Sachs donated tons of money to Democrats, and they are positioned to strike it rich if cap-and-trade passes. Steve Milloy writes that “Goldman Sachs has spent millions of dollars lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation in anticipation of making billions of dollars at the expense taxpayers and consumers.”

The war on small business

Here is a Fox News article that describes how the cap-and-trade bill championed by Democrats like Waxman and Gore destroys small businesses. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

David McArthur, vice president of the 52-year-old family operation, a Gateway City institution, is one of a growing number of business owners and taxpayers nationwide who are mobilizing against the so-called cap-and-trade bill, which would levy harsh fines on energy consumption that harms the environment.

McArthur told FOXNews.com that every aspect of his business relies on the forms of energy targeted by the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and that his congressman, Carnahan, was supporting “a direct tax increase on small business” by voting for it.

“We make (our product) with electricity, we bake it with gas, we refrigerate and freeze it with electricity and we distribute it with gas and oil,” said McArthur, who said he worries that high prices could cost his company up to $15,000 a year in an industry with a very tight margin for profit.

This is cause-and-effect, people. There is a reason why Cuba and North Korea are poor today – they voted in radical leftists just like Obama. This is the way the world actually works.

Obama’s energy tax ships jobs overseas

The Times Online reports that India and China decided against crippling their economies for the myth of global warming. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

As world leaders sat down for a working lunch at the start of a three day meeting of the G8, it emerged that negotiations had failed to reach agreement on halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Summit negotiators, who do the hard bargaining before the heads of state arrive to complete the agreements, failed to make progress on the issue in talks that continued late last night. China and India are understood to have blocked any mention of the target in the draft communiqué, insisting that the developed economies should promise to cut their own emissions sharply by 2020 before asking developing nations to commit to a long term target.

The breakdown in negotiations has undermined President Obama’s chances of producing a diplomatic coup when he chairs talks on climate change at a meeting of the 17-nation Major Economies Forum tomorrow.

Where do you think all our manufacturing jobs will go when it becomes expensive to manufacture goods here?

Meanwhile, WattsUpWithThat reports that Prince Edward Island in Canada is seeing the first frost ever in July.

News

Peer-reviewed paper says there is no atheistic explanation for the Cambrian explosion

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Story from the Discovery Institute.

A new peer-reviewed paper has been published that concludes that there is no material explanation for the massive amounts of information introduced during the Cambrian explosion, when all of the phyla came into being in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking, with no fossilized precursors.

Excerpt:

Thus, elucidating the materialistic basis of the Cambrian explosion has become more elusive, not less, the more we know about the event itself, and cannot be explained away by coupling extinction of intermediates with long stretches of geologic time, despite the contrary claims of some modern neo-Darwinists.

Once again, the progress of science brings light.

The DI post goes on to cite another passage from the paper:

Beginning some 555 million years ago the Earth’s biota changed in profound and fundamental ways, going from an essentially static system billions of years in existence to the one we find today, a dynamic and awesomely complex system whose origin seems to defy explanation. Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous animal phyla with very distinct body plans arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time. The abruptness of the transition between the ‘‘Precambrian’’ and the Cambrian was apparent right at the outset of our science with the publication of Murchison’s The Silurian System, a treatise that paradoxically set forth the research agenda for numerous paleontologists — in addition to serving as perennial fodder for creationists. The reasoning is simple — as explained on an intelligent-design t-shirt.

Fact: Forty phyla of complex animals suddenly appear in the fossil record, no forerunners, no transitional forms leading to them; ‘‘a major mystery,’’ a ‘‘challenge.’’ The Theory of Evolution – exploded again (idofcourse.com).

Although we would dispute the numbers, and aside from the last line, there is not much here that we would disagree with. Indeed, many of Darwin’s contemporaries shared these sentiments, and we assume — if Victorian fashion dictated — that they would have worn this same t-shirt with pride.

Here is the reference for the paper:

(Kevin J. Peterson, Michael R. Dietrich and Mark A. McPeek, “MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion,” BioEssays, Vol. 31 (7):736 – 747 (2009).)

I linked before to a bunch of easy-to-understand videos that explain the Cambrian explosion. That post has a link to another peer-reviewed research paper written by Stephen C. Meyer, on the Cambrian explosion.

Christian parents: be sure to encourage your children to do the best they can in science, and push them to go on to graduate school to earn their Ph.Ds. We really need to have people working on these problems who are not wedded to the pre-supposition of atheism. We need to have people who are open-minded and willing to go wherever the evidence leads.

Further study

One of my favorite resources on the origin of life is this interview from the University of California with former atheist and origin of life researcher Dean Kenyon. Kenyon, a professor of Biology at San Francisco State University, wrote the textbook on “chemical evolution”, which is the view that chemicals can arrange themselves in order to create the first living cell, without intervention.

This interview from the University of California with another origin of life researcher, Charles Thaxton, is also one of my favorites.

You’ll need Quicktime to see the videos, or buy the videos from ARN. (Kenyon, Thaxton) I have both of them – they rock!