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POPSWaPo: 'Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit' -- "It's not unreasonable to say, 'We're inheriting a budget that's going to have substantial deficits into the future'....But after we've been saying, 'Bush has irresponsible policies we can't afford,' he will be asking us to replace them with different policies we can't afford,' " said a Democratic congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly. -- "Leaving some of the tax cuts in place would cost us a small fortune," said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), a member of a group of conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs who have been adamant about following pay-as-you-go rules. "I don't know that any Blue Dog has a good way to pay for that." Perhaps we should recommend closing the deficit a bit by imposing a tax on newsprint paper, just to see how comfortable the Washington Post and other tax-hiking newspapers are with raising taxes on everyone and everything.
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POPSHey! Let's Give 1.7 Trillion $$$ to Corporations! "I think there's a very good chance he will change his position, yet again. He's changed his position on taxes many times, and I think he probably will change it again - because his target audience now is no longer conservative activists, its actually middle of the road voters. And most voters do not find 1.7 trillion dollar for corporations a great agenda. So we expect that he will change it up a little bit."
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POPSUK faces economic crunch "Here's a plea signed by ten thousand schoolchildren, begging you to join us and save them. Here's a plea from a home for the crippled. Here's a petition sent by the ministers of two hundred different faiths-Here's an appeal from the mothers of the country. Read them." "Is this an order?" "No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "It's not an order!" Galt remained motionless, not extending his hand for the papers. "These are just plain, ordinary people, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison in a tone intended to project their abject humility. "They can't tell you what to do. They wouldn't know. They're merely begging you. They may be weak, helpless, blind, ignorant. But you, who are so intelligent and strong, can't you take pity on them? Can't you help them?" "By dropping my intelligence and following their blindness?"
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POPSUS and Russia- Tension in the ISS ? Once there was peace, for a while, now missiles, radars, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. But noooo, Condi, Bush and cohorts had to run the world into a new cold war.
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POPSResearch has linked iris patterns to personality traits like warmth, trust, and positive emotions "Intriguingly, mutations in PAX6 have also been linked with high rates of unusual behavior, including poor impulse control and abnormalities in associated brain structures, like the left cingulate cortex. Still, cautions Larsson, looking deep into people’s eyes won’t give you irrefutable insight into their personality. “We’ve only looked at group effects,” he says. “It’s not possible to describe an individual’s personality from our data.”
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POPSA compromise? Drilling for alternative energy tax credits Seems like an interesting possibility here. Give the Republicans what they want (more drilling) in exchange for what the Democrats want (extension of tax credits for wind, solar, etc.). You would think that this combination would show that the U.S. government is truly committed to doing whatever it takes to bring down our reliance on foreign oil.
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POPSChina Using Olympics As ‘Pretext’ For Crackdown: Amnesty
“Authorities have used the Olympic Games as a pretext to continue and in some respects, intensify existing policies and practices that have led to serious and widespread violations of human rights,” the report added. It listed a series of recommendations urging China to: * release all prisoners of conscience; * stop police arbitrarily detaining activists and dissenters; * impose a moratorium on the death penalty; * allow complete media freedom; and * account for those killed or detained in Tibet. “It is very disturbing that Chinese authorities have indulged in such a big crackdown on the activists,” Mark Allison, China researcher for Amnesty, told AFP. “These are people who represent many many more people in China.” Officials were also extending the use of punitive administrative detention, notably of activists and petitioners as well as beggars and peddlers, Amnesty said. In January, Beijing police launched a campaign against “illegal activ
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POPSO'Reilly is Just So....Funny! I never had seen this until someone posted it on youtube the other day. I don't watch Bill very much, once in a while I catch his shows and find him to be seriously funny, yet somehow also think he is sad and pathetic, since he seems to actually BELIEVE the crap he is saying. But here he is in yet another humorous yet pitiful moment! Enjoy!
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POPSThe big Buzz... It won't, though, be as complete as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its brand (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can make switching away from Google difficult for users. Costello realizes that Cuil needs to layer in additional services, but as he said to me, the company has to start somewhere. Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. try it on: http://www.cuil.com/
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POPSHow solution deployment has changed development with SharePoint technologies For example, here is a high level generic step by step process that usually happens: Spec written (some people seem to think this step is optional) Developer develops code etc... Usually on a stand-alone, single server SharePoint environment. (I personally use a VPC for all development these days) Developer packages code into an installer if you are lucky Testing Hand off to production people who go and install it on the server(s). Depending on how your development team packaged these would depend on how much work you had to do to deploy them.