What got cut from the stimulus bill?
What got cut from the stimulus bill?
What got cut from the stimulus bill?
The Senate bill is now inferior to the House's in terms of stimulative effect.
- Out: Education and State aid: The compromise Senate bill "cuts all $16 billion from the original bill for K-12 school construction, [and] trims more than $1 billion from Head Start programs for youngsters." Of the $83 billion cut by the Nelson-Collins gang, $40 billion of it was for state stabilization funding. This is incredibly important funding meant for "helping states and localities avoid wide-scale cuts in services and layoffs of public employees."
- In: Ineffective tax breaks: One example --- Republicans added the "house flipping subsidy", a $15,000 home-buyers credit, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.
Interestingly, the most criticized provisions of Obama's stimulus package comprise a very small portion (less than 2%) of the total economic recovery legislation. Read about this in 'Republicans Mount Mini-Criticisms of Stimulus in the Media'.
Want to learn about what's in the stimulus package in the first place? Try 'Recovery and Reinvestment 101' and the 'A Guide to How the Stimulus Works' video.
Go here for some programs that have been cut, either entirely or partially in the latest Senate version.
Jym Ganahl says global warming is media mind control conspiracy
The Other Paper is reporting that Jym Ganahl is going public that he is a global warming denier. Jym is Columbus-based NBC 4 chief meteorologist.
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In a YouTube video, Jym Ganahl denies the scientific basis behind global warming backed up by the hundreds of scientific peer-reviewed articles:
"At times we are under a lot of criticism for our thinking about global warming. And they wanted to take away our credentials and shut us down as meteorologists without any scientific basis or fact behind what they are saying." [Emphasis added]
Ganahl believes that a vast mind-control conspiracy encompassing virtually every media outlet is to blame:
"Remember when 'War of the Worlds' first came out with Orson Wells with mind control and controlling people through the media and you can see how that can happen. That over the course of the years -- with swine flu, with west nile --- we panic the population and then it turns out to be false. But it's amazing to me that people believe what they see --and the Internet is another tool for that --- and they can be controlled. And it's remarkable how invasive that can be."
Ganahl's belief about the causes of global warming contradicts the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , which represents consensus in the scientific community. The IPCC concluded that the dominant causes for recent climate change result from these 3 human activities
- increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases,
- global changes to land surface, such as deforestation,
- increasing atmospheric concentrations of aerosols.
Ganahl insists that the primarily cause of global warming is sun spots.
Here are the three critical points, backed up by science:
- The empirical evidence that human activity has and continues to add meaningful quantities of Green House Gases to the biosphere is overwhelming.
- Recent observed increased global temperature and other events around the world are highly correlated to those increased Green House Gas levels.
- Past climate models which predicted that an increase in Green House Gases from human activity would produce defined, specific consequences have been borne out.
May we suggest
- A fascinating view into a part of our society we rarely see. Cheryl Zeigler, an 18-year-old single mother from the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, travels with her trainer to an amateur boxing match and dreams of going pro.
- Is the old media sustaining the old politics? News and analysis with NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald.
- A Florida community, once a middle-class exurb, is facing hunger problems due to a steep decline in the number of construction jobs available.
- The recent salmonella outbreak has raised some alarming questions about food safety and the F.D.A.'s oversight of the food supply.