Month: June 2007

Warplane nose art Done in by PC RAF

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Another grand tradition lost.

PC brigade ban pin-ups on RAF jets – in case they offend women and Muslims

In killer heels and little else, they have a definite deadly charm.

But the risque images of women that have decorated warplanes since the First World War have been scrubbed out.

The Ministry of Defence has decreed they could offend the RAF’s female personnel.

Officials admitted they had no record of any complaints from the 5,400 women in the RAF.

But commanders are erring firmly on the side of caution and “nose art”, as it is known, has been consigned to the history books.

Harrier jump jet bombers currently launching daily airstrikes against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan have been scrubbed clean to comply with the orders.

Critics said the MoD should be focusing on more important issues – such as the quality and quantity of equipment available to British forces sent off to war.

Nose art first appeared on warplanes during the First World War and enjoyed a golden age during the Second World War when thousands of American fighters and bombers were decorated with pictures of glamorous women.

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Some Interesting Pieces of Economic News

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Some news that, when taken together, sounds like a perfect storm.

This first one is most straightforward:

Home foreclosures leap 19 percent in May – Jun. 12, 2007
90% leap over last year; figure pushed up by slowing real estate market, subprime meltdown.
June 12 2007: 3:23 PM EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Home foreclosures in May jumped 90 percent from a year earlier, reflecting a poor spring housing market and foreshadowing even higher levels later in 2007, real estate data firm RealtyTrac said Tuesday.

The May foreclosures – a sum of default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions – totaled 176,137, up 19 percent from April, the firm said in its May
‘After a barely perceptible dip in April, foreclosure activity roared back with a vengeance in May,’ James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, said in a statement.

‘Such strong activity in the midst of the typical spring buying season could foreshadow even higher foreclosure levels later in the year,’ said Saccacio. ‘Certainly not every community nationwide is seeing an increase in foreclosures, but foreclosed properties are becoming more commonplace and adding to the downward pressure on home prices in many areas.’

RealtyTrac said there was a national foreclosure rate of one foreclosure filing for every 656 U.S. households during May.

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The message here is very basic. We are headed for some VERY bad times in real estate.

Even if one assumes a 24% YoY increase in foreclosures in the next three years, that puts foreclosures down to about 1 filing for every 328 homes at the end of that, and we have a few TRILLION in mortgage resets on adjustable rate mortgages coming down the pipe.

I’m not sure if the market will drop significantly, or just become illiquid. The latter is MUCH worse, becaude it means that you can’t sell a house period.

The next one is a bit more complex. Basically, the private equity frenzy is being squeezed by higher interest rates. This is yet ANOTHER bubble, in this case, it is driving the stock market, and it looks to be close deflating

The people who really drive these deals make their money on the transaction, and if they can’t buy, then they will sell.

Rising rates threaten the buyout boom

A shift in the bond market could signal an end to the cheap money that has fueled the surge in private equity buyouts.
By Grace Wong, CNNMoney.com staff writer

By Grace Wong, CNNMoney.com staff writer
June 12 2007: 1:08 PM EDT

LONDON (CNNMoney.com) — Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, took home nearly $400 million in pay last year and stands to reap billions when his firm goes public – a reflection of the booming success of private equity firms.

But the favorable conditions that have lined the pockets of Schwarzman and other kings of the buyout business are running into headwinds.

For years, Blackstone and other private equity firms – which have become the new face of dealmaking on Wall Street – have basked in an era of cheap money and low interest rates. But turmoil in the Treasury bond market is raising worries that this golden age may be coming to an end.

Bond pricesfrom Tokyo to Frankfurt to New York have sold off in recent weeks amid concerns that interest rates are marching higher worldwide. That’s pushed up bond yields and fueled worries that it will be harder to borrow money. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.

“This is the end of the cheap money cycle,” said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald.

In the United States, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note has kept pushing higher since it eclipsed the key 5 percent level last week. Early Tuesday, the yield was around 5.21 percent, up from 4.88 percent just two weeks ago.

Analysts say the rise in bond yields means bond investors are finally coming to terms with big changes in the global economy – such as rising commodity prices and rising labor costs in former low-cost countries like China – and many expect long-term yields to keep heading higher.

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Finally, we have inflation heating up in China. This means that the Chinese central bank will have have to raise interest rates, which will have the effect of strengthening the Chinese Yuan, which will have the effect of weakening the dollar, increasing US inflation.

This will likely, for both currency and inflation reasons, lead to increased rates from our central bank, the Fed.

Food costs send inflation in China to 27-month high – Jun. 12, 2007

Rising cost of pork sends food prices soaring in May; more interest rate hikes expected.
June 12 2007: 3:50 AM EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) — Surging food prices boosted China’s annual consumer price inflation in May to a 27-month high, extending a rising trend and reinforcing expectations that interest rates will rise further.

Inflation quickened to 3.4 percent from 3.0 percent in April, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday, as food prices, which make up a third of the consumer basket, rose 8.3 percent from a year earlier and a shortage of pork caused meat prices to jump 26.5 percent.

The overall inflation figure was in line with the median forecast of a Reuters poll of economists, but Shanghai’s benchmark stock market index fell as much as 2.1 percent at one point on expectations of tighter monetary policy. It recovered in early afternoon to stand 0.65 percent higher.

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Look for This on Ebay

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Remember my post about Bush getting his watch stolen?

Here is a description.

From Mystery of President Bush’s watch in Albania

Italian media reports said that Mr Bush only noticed his watch was missing when he got back to his armour-plated people-mover to be whisked back to Tirana airport. By the time he stood on the aircraft steps to wave goodbye someone on his staff had given him a replacement watch. He is said to wear a $50 Timex with the Stars and Stripes on the dial.

Heck…I’m tempted to put a similar model of watch up for bidding on Ebay.

And in the War over Spam Bots, There is Escalation

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A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a human — until you fill out a captcha.

Captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. These are supposed to be easy for people to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out.

Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites.

There is only one problem. As online mischief makers design better ways to circumvent or defeat captchas, Web companies are responding by making the puzzles more challenging to solve — even for people.

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“You can make a captcha absolutely undefeatable by computers, but at some point, you are turning this from a human reading test into an intelligence test and an acuity test,” said Michael Barrett, the chief information security officer at PayPal, a division of eBay. “We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

If that is true, at least captchas had a good run. Though several researchers devised similar tests early in the decade, credit for inventing the technology usually goes to Carnegie Mellon University, which was asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a method to prevent rogue programs from invading its chat rooms and e-mail service.


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Yet some of that activity can be ethically murky. Aleksey Kolupaev, 25, works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.

He lives in the former Soviet Union there’s a surprise.

On the bright side, with the mob penetration of those countries, hitmen are cheap and plentiful.

Microsoft researchers have developed an alternative captcha that asks Internet users to view nine images of household pets and then select just the cats or the dogs.

“For software, this is wildly hard,” said John Douceur, a Microsoft researcher. “Computers are tripped up by all the photos at different angles, with variable lighting conditions and backgrounds and the animals in different positions.”

The project, called Asirra (for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), uses photographs of animals from Petfinder.com, a site that finds homes for homeless pets and has more than two million images in its database.

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It would be nice if this were to get some of those animals adopted.

Adopt a stray. Mutts and alley cats are just as good pets, and they don’t have the flaws from inbreeding.

He added: “No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

Not everyone feels that the traditional captcha is finished. Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the team that invented captchas, recently unveiled an effort to give them new usefulness.

His reCaptcha project (recaptcha.net) seeks to block spam while handling the challenge of digitally scanning old books and making them available in Web search engines.

When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn’s project makes it part of a captcha. After the mystery word has been verified by several people, it is fed back into the digital copy of the book.

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That is an insanely good “out of the box” application for this technology.

Doughy Pantload Wants to Eliminate Public Schools

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Let’s be clear about this. There are two goals here. Eliminating the teachers’ unions, because they support dems, and resegregating schools.

Do away with public schools – Los Angeles Times
Jonah Goldberg

Government is inept at running schools. It should subsidize education for needy students, then get out of the way.
June 12, 2007

HERE’S A GOOD question for you: Why have public schools at all?

OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government’s interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can’t leave any child behind.

he problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid “behind” is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90% of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run 90% of the schools — particularly when it gets terrible results?

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Brown Disses Tony Blair Over “Dodgy Dossier”

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Brown has pretty much said that Blair used maipulated intel on this.

When the Tories win, there will be an investigation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony Blair goes to gaol over this, as well he should.

Brown promises to avoid the mistakes that led to war in Iraq

By Andrew Grice and Ben Russell
Published: 12 June 2007

Gordon Brown has promised to prevent the “party political” use of intelligence material so that he would never repeat Tony Blair’s mistake in taking Britain to war on a flawed prospectus.

On his first visit to Baghdad, the incoming prime minister said he would learn lessons from the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when Mr Blair based his case for war on intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Brown said he had already begun discussions with Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, to ensure security and intelligence material was collected “free of the party political process” and was ” fully verified” if it was to be made public. “That is learning the lessons from things that happened in the past, and we should make sure that we can do things better in the future,” he said.

His remarks were seen as a barely coded criticism of Mr Blair and an attempt to draw a line under a controversy which left a stain on the Government. Mr Blair’s official spokesman said measures to reform the use of intelligence recommended by the 2004 Butler inquiry were already being taken forward.

The Chancellor, who heard nine mortar shells land near by during his Baghdad visit, refused to be drawn on a possible cut in the number of British troops in Iraq. He said he was there to “listen and learn” and that such decisions were for another day.

In interviews, he declined to repeat Mr Blair’s pledge to the Iraqis that Britain would not “cut and run” but said Britain had obligations to the Iraqi people and the United Nations. He said the number of British forces would continue to decline as Iraqis took over more responsibility for security.

Mr Blair and Mr Brown rejected growing demands for an immediate inquiry into the mistakes made before and since the invasion, but Mr Brown left open the option of calling one after more British troops have left Iraq.

Last night a Tory attempt to force the Government to hold an inquiry into the conflict was rejected by 288 votes to 253 in the Commons. Ten Labour MPs backed the calls for an inquiry.

Earlier, the Government amendment saying that a further inquiry would ” divert attention” from the campaign in Iraq was passed by 274 votes to 229, a majority of 45.

During the debate, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, had dismissed the idea as self-indulgent and poured scorn on Conservative calls for the Government to accept the principle of an inquiry, insisting that there had been four inquiries into the war.

She said: “To carry this motion would be both an unnecessary and a damaging diversion of effort, focus and attention. All our time and energy is badly needed now to address the challenges of the present. It is our responsibility to the people of Iraq which should receive our focus and attention in the critical times ahead.”

William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, urged ministers to bow to the ” gathering consensus” and called for an inquiry by privy councillors. He said: “It’s not true that our troops would be demoralised or our enemies would take heart if we took the trouble to find out what’s gone wrong. In a democratic society the examination of successes and failures is a sign of strength not of weakness.” Michael Moore, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, told MPs: “The Government is still trying to avoid an inquiry while hinting that there will be one, simply ducking the question of when.”

Fox News Doesn’t Do News

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Yes, they spend more time on she who must not be named than they do on the Iraq war.

That’s ignoring the pundits who are dishonest, stupid, and just plain insane.

War takes up less time on Fox News – Yahoo! News

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer Mon Jun 11, 9:52 AM ET

NEW YORK – On a winter day when bomb blasts at an Iraqi university killed dozens and the United Nations estimated that 34,000 civilians in Iraq had died in 2006, MSNBC spent nearly nine minutes on the stories during the 1 p.m. hour. A CNN correspondent in Iraq did a three-minute report about the bombings.

Neither story merited a mention on Fox News Channel that hour.

That wasn’t unusual. Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months of the year, and considerably less than CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN’s daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC’s. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time.

The independent think tank’s report freshens a debate over whether ideology drives news agendas, and it comes at a delicate time for Fox. Top Democratic presidential candidates have refused to appear at debates sponsored by Fox. Liberals find attacking Fox is a way to fire up their base.”

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The Surge is Working—NOT

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We’ve already lost. Let’s get out before we lose any more troops.

Bombings target 3 key bridges in Iraq – Yahoo! News
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 41 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – Suspected Sunni insurgents bombed and badly damaged a span over the main north-south highway leading from Baghdad on Tuesday — the third bridge attack in as many days in an apparent campaign against key transportation arteries.

The attack occurred 35 miles south of Baghdad and just six miles south of a bridge brought down on Sunday by what was believed to be a suicide truck bomber. Three U.S. soldiers guarding that bridge were killed in Sunday’s blast.

The explosion at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday — not thought to be a suicide bomb — struck a bridge linking the villages of al-Qariya al-Asriyah and al-Rashayed in northern Babil province.

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We’re F&^%ing Up Afghanistan

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This is why Iraq is so dangerous. There are places in the world that need those resources.

U.S. Troops Kill 7 Afghan Police

U.S. Troops Kill 7 Afghan Police
Tuesday, Jun. 12, 2007 By AP
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(KABUL, Afghanistan) — Afghan police mistakenly thought U.S. troops on a nighttime mission were Taliban fighters and opened fire on them, prompting U.S. forces to return fire and call in attack aircraft, killing seven Afghan police, officials said Tuesday.

U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops, meanwhile, killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during an eight-hour battle in southern Afghanistan on Monday, the coalition said.

President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman labeled the shooting at a remote police checkpoint in the eastern province of Nangarhar ‘a tragic incident’ caused by a lack of communication.

‘The police forces were not aware of the coalition’s operation,’ said spokesman Karim Rahimi. ‘The police checkpoint in the area thought that they were the enemy, so police opened fire on the coalition, and then the coalition thought that the enemies were firing on them, so they returned fire back.’

The commander at the post, Esanullah, who goes by one name, said U.S. gunfire and helicopter rockets killed seven policemen and wounded four.

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Dennis Kucinich Charging Windmills Again

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To describe Kucinich as Quixotic is an understatement.

If he charges at any more windmills, the USA will be a windmill free zone.

Let’s be clear. A 50 degree F delta creates only a 3% difference, and since gas is almost always in underground tanks, you won’t see more than a 10 degree delta, or a 0.6% delta, the equivalent of less than $0.02/gallon.

It’s a non issue.

Expanding gasoline a heated issue – Los Angeles Times

U.S. lawmakers press for service stations to install devices to give customers what they pay for in the summer.
By Elizabeth Douglass, Times Staff Writer
June 9, 2007

Federal lawmakers took aim at oil companies and service station owners Friday, accusing them of cheating customers by ignoring fuel’s tendency to expand with higher temperatures. U.S. motorists could pay an extra $1.5 billion this summer because of it, they said.

“It is a little-known industry secret that the amount of gasoline you put in your tank when you fill up in the summer is less than the amount in the winter, in terms of weight and energy content,” said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio), who conducted a congressional hearing on the issue Friday.

“People are paying for gasoline they’re not getting.”

The “hot fuel” price penalty is legal — and not in dispute. But consumer groups, truckers and others say the cost to drivers is soaring along with gasoline and diesel prices. They want gas stations to install devices that would end the inequity by automatically adjusting volume according to the temperature at the pump.

“You’re not getting a real gallon when it’s hot,” said John Telles, a Pinole, Calif., trucker who joined one of several lawsuits filed last year against fuel retailers over the practice.

“I figure every time I fill up my truck, it’s costing me probably anywhere from $5 to $10, and every time I fill the car, it costs me a buck or two. I lose money on it,” Telles said in an interview.

The cost of the problem is most evident in California, where the weather is consistently warm and motorists pay among the nation’s highest prices for fuel. During the summer, fuel expansion could cause motorists here to overpay for gasoline by $228 million, according to a new report by the House subcommittee on domestic policy, which held Friday’s hearing.

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You Know Housing Sucks when the San Diego Paper is Pessimistic

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So much of their revenue of all papers comes from realtors ads that they are universally cheerleaders for real estate.

Just a few months ago, they said it would be over in the 2nd half of 2007, now it’s “Well into 2008”.

I was in the Massachusetts real estate crash in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It was local, and relatively small.

It took 2-3 years to get back to normal, and the price drop was far less than we will see here.

This will be 5-10 years.

Subprimes, affordability cited for industry’s woes

By Emmet Pierce
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

June 12, 2007

The implosion of the subprime mortgage market is likely to prolong the national housing slump, Harvard University researchers said yesterday in their annual report on the state of the nation’s housing.

“At a minimum it will slow any recovery,” said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which issued the report. “Add to that the overbuilding and the inventory correction and you can see why it appears, particularly for the new-home market, that this slump will last well into 2008.” (emphasis mine)

Housing-industry analysts say the riskiest subprime adjustable-rate loans were made in 2005 and 2006. As they reset at higher interest rates through 2008, they are likely to fuel the current surge in foreclosures.

As lenders move to tighten loose credit standards and prevent defaults, it will become harder and harder for subprime borrowers to refinance into more affordable loans, Retsinas said.

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More Bush Admin Corruption

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Once again, we see that there is no policy, just politics.

GSA chief accused of Hatch Act violation

By JIM ABRAMS

WASHINGTON — The head of the main federal contracting agency, a longtime GOP supporter, should be “punished to the fullest extent” for violating a ban on political advocacy on government time, a watchdog agency concluded.

The Office of Special Counsel, in a letter to President Bush released late Monday, said General Services Administrator Lurita Doan engaged in “the most pernicious of political activity” banned by the 1939 Hatch Act when she asked, at a meeting of General Services Administration political appointees, how they could help Republican candidates.

“I recommend that Administrator Doan be disciplined to the fullest extent for her serious violation of the Hatch Act and insensitivity to cooperating fully and honestly in the course of our investigation,” wrote Scott Bloch, special counsel for the independent investigative and prosecutorial agency.

Doan’s attorney, in a June 1 response to Bloch also released Monday, rejected the office’s conclusions, saying Doan was only peripherally involved in the January 26 PowerPoint presentation by a senior White House political adviser at GSA headquarters on helping Republicans in coming elections.

Michael J. Nardotti, Jr., of Patton Boggs LLP, criticized the “lack of objectivity and impartiality” by the Office of Special Counsel and said it had “resulted in an extraordinary unfairness to Administrator Doan.” He urged the president to disapprove the report and submit the matter to another entity outside the Office of Special Counsel.

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USAF considers scrapping Lockheed Martin JASSM deal-07/06/2007-Washington DC-Flight International

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This is a very large program, and it would be a VERY big deal if it got canceled, but it should be canceled.

USAF considers scrapping Lockheed Martin JASSM deal-07/06/2007-Washington DC

By Stephen Trimble

The US Air Force may cancel the Lockheed Martin AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile programme unless the government and the contractor can agree on a plan to resolve systemic reliability issues by 27 June. The air force has invited Lockheed to propose a way forward for the programme during a 30-day assessment period, but officials are not optimistic about the potential for a successful deal.

The USAF is prepared to replace JASSM with a new-start programme or order an alternative, such as an air-launched version of the Raytheon BGM-109 Tactical Tomahawk or MBDA’s Storm Shadow.

JASSM is a stealthy, penetrating cruise missile with a 453kg (1,000lb)-class warhead. Although the capability remains a requirement for warfighters, the USAF is willing to scrap the programme for a more reliable product. “We do not know if we will be able to certify this programme,” says Sue Peyton, assistant secretary of the air force for acquisition.

The $5.8 billion programme needs to be certificated in order to proceed, after breaching the so-called Nunn-McCurdy limit, a congressional rule for any programme that exceeds its original budget by at least 25%. So far, the air force has spent $2 billion on developing and producing the weapon.

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The certification requirement allows the USAF to pressure Lockheed to resolve a perceived reliability crisis with JASSM. In 64 flight tests to date, the JASSM has recorded 39 successes and 25 failures, with the latter caused by a wide range of usually small manufacturing quality errors or design glitches.

The air force wants Lockheed to submit an acceptable plan that would elevate the missile’s 58% reliability rate to a minimum of 75%, Peyton says. The service is willing to pick up some of the costs for the reliability improvements, but Lockheed’s proposal must show “the air force they really, really want this programme” by also contributing to the extra cost, she adds.

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Those numbers are hideous. Even their 75% target is a big wet kiss to Lockheed.

Cancellation for cause would be a good thing.

My Email to the Edwards Campaign

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I meant what I said. I am leaning toward his candidacy, and I want an apology from Mr. Sanders. A real one, not a phony “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” apology.

The text (pasted into their web form):

I recently read Dave “Mudcat” Sanders’ blog on time, and I am profoundly concerned by what he wrote on Time’s Swampland Blog.
There are a number of reasons:

* It was anti-Jewish. Specifically his slam of “elitist wing of the Democratic Party, or what I refer to as the “Metropolitan Opera Wing”.” is specifically a call to Jew Baiting.

* It was homophobic.

* It was racist, or at least it used racist code words.

I’m not of any particular importance. I have a blog with (perhaps) 100 readers a day (no I did not drop a few 0s, we are talking Z-list blogger).

I was a precinct captain for Howard Dean in 2004, but obviously the campaign was suspended before the Maryland primary.

I am given to understand that he is an adviser to your campaign.

I have not yet made a decision on which candidate to endorse, but you are currently the candidate I favor.

I will be making an endorsement before the Iowa caucuses (that and $2.50 will get you a Starbucks).

I am not suggesting that you separate Mr Saunders from your campaign.

However, SOMEONE should tell him that he needs to think before he talks.

I understand that sometimes consultants are tempted to sell themselves too much, and I believe that this is what happened here.

This campaign needs to be about John Edwards, not Dave “Mudcat” Saunders.

I would suggest that he apologize. It should be heartfelt, not a phony “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” apology, and it should be made clear to him that he needs to give his advice in private in the future.

Specter to vote against Gonzales – Yahoo! News

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This is a good thing. Bush won’t let Abu Gonzalez go, because he knows where the bodies are buried, and he is a close personal friend.

We also now have confirmation that the vote means nothing, because Spector votes with the Dems only when it does not matter.

Top Republican to vote against Gonzales – Yahoo! News: “By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 16 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee said Monday he will vote for a no-confidence resolution against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
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Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., said he’s concerned like others in his party that the resolution, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and up for a test vote later in the day, was a Democratic effort to embarrass Bush and push Gonzales to resign.

But Specter has long said that Gonzales has exercised poor leadership on a host of issues, from the firings of eight federal prosecutors to the Justice Department’s handling of wiretapping authority under the USA Patriot Act.

‘If you ask Arlen Specter, do I have confidence in Attorney General Gonzales, the answer is a resounding no,’ Specter said during a news conference in Philadelphia. ‘I’m going to vote that I have no confidence in Attorney General Gonzales.'”

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This is Bullsh$#!

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Here is the problem: You want the most numerate students entering college to select a profession where pay is marginal, layoffs are rife, status is low (how many engineers have a secretary?), the positions are constantly under threat of outsourcing, and your bosses are technically and mathematically illiterate morons.

So you are saying, “Gee you have special and valuable skills, how about taking a low paying job for a career where you will be dumped for younger cheaper labor when you are in your 40s.

Had I thought more about the real world, I would not have gone into engineering school. I would have gone into business school, made my millions, spent my two years in a low security prison playing ping pong with Jack Abramhoff, and have gotten out with three homes, 5 cars, and my kids college education fully funded.

If you want more people to be engineers, pay them more and make their employment more stable.

Engineering Encouragement for Youth(Subscription Required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/11/2007, page 13

Edited by Patricia J. Parmalee

Printed headline: Engineering Future Talent

A New Jersey fifth-grader will get a taste of the future this summer as winner of a Lockheed Martin-sponsored essay competition, a part of its national Space Day initiative. Victoria Geyer’s entry earned her a spot at Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. See http://www.spaceday.org. And BAE Systems has launched a nationwide competition offering a team of students the chance to be ‘test pilots for a day’ at their Military Air Solutions site in the U.K. where they will fly the Typhoon simulator. See http://www.baesystemseducationprogramme.com

Bush Diplomacy Leaves Debris in Its Wake

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The program is splitting Europe because it is poorly conceived and dishonestly presented.

Again, I refer you to my post on the patent system to provide some perspective on the level of performance of this administration

NATO Struggles With Missile Defense(Subscription Required)

Russian pressure heightens missile defense concerns within NATO

Printed headline: Out of Sync

NATO nations are growing increasingly divided over how to move forward plans to establish European missile defenses, with unease exacerbated by concern over Russia’s strategic objectives.

Officials at NATO Headquarters in Brussels say the U.S. plan to station a radar site and 10 interceptor missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland, using bilateral agreements, is throwing NATO’s own approach off balance. NATO worries are being aggravated by what one official describes as ‘well-orchestrated Russian pressure on all chess boards simultaneously, ranging from the CFE [Conventional Armed Forces in Europe] treaty to energy, Estonia, Kosovo, NATO expansion and missile defense.’ Moscow’s latest gambit is the offer of a joint missile defense system to be sited in Azerbaijan.

The crux of the problem is that the U.S. system is designed to provide protection for the continental U.S., and will only give some European coverage, through the proposed Polish and Czech sites. The NATO missile defense architecture would protect all of Europe. Command and control also remains an area of contention.

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Let’s be clear. This is directed at Russia, Iran is just a pretext here.

That’s why Putin’s proposal of locating the radar in Azerbaijan made the Bushies look like fools.

It’s better to protect Europe, and does not threaten the Russians, which is the real objective of the US, Poland, and the Czech Republic.