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dkf's JournalWeiner estimates he sexted three women after resigning
(CNN) - Anthony Weiner, the embattled New York City mayoral candidate who admitted this week to sending raunchy chats to a young woman last summer, estimated Thursday he had online relationships with three different women after his 2011 resignation from Congress.
But speaking at a news conference, the Democrat said he couldn't say for sure how many more women might come forward.
"There are a few. I don't have a specific number for you," Weiner said. "There are people I've had exchanges with that are completely appropriate, and that there are no pictures or illicit texts or anything. Now if those people want to say they don't like the exchanges we had either, I don't know where to put them."
Weiner stepped down from his House seat in 2011 after admitting to sending lewd photos and messages to multiple women online. He pointed out Thursday that when he left the House of Representatives, he admitted to exchanging messages with six women.
He then provided a rough total of how many women he's engaged with sexually online.
"It's not dozens and dozens," he said. "It's six to ten, I suppose, but I can't tell you absolutely what people are going to consider inappropriate or not."
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/25/weiner-estimates-he-sexted-three-women-after-resigning/
Colleen Hanabusa voted "no" on the Amash amendment.
Brian Schatz voted no on the FISA update last year.
If you care about the 4th amendment, it is becoming obvious who is our champion and who is a problem.
The Senate primary is going to be Schatz vs Hanabusa, I hope Schatz prevails.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3648737
Amash Amendment On NSA Data Collection: House Roll Call Vote
The Associated Press
Jul 24, 2013
The 217-205 roll call Wednesday by which the House rejected a challenge to the National Security Agency's secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' phone records.
A "yes" vote was a vote to halt the NSA program; a "no" vote was a vote to allow the program to continue.Voting yes were 111 Democrats and 94 Republicans.
Voting no were 83 Democrats and 134 Republicans.
HAWAII
Democrats – Gabbard, Y; Hanabusa, N.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3648737
Amash Amendment On NSA Data Collection: House Roll Call Vote
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3648737The 217-205 roll call Wednesday by which the House rejected a challenge to the National Security Agency's secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' phone records.
A "yes" vote was a vote to halt the NSA program; a "no" vote was a vote to allow the program to continue.Voting yes were 111 Democrats and 94 Republicans.
Voting no were 83 Democrats and 134 Republicans.
Click on link to see how your rep voted.
Family helped by George Zimmerman after crash to hold press conference
A man who authorities say was helped to safety — along with his wife and children — by George Zimmerman after a roll-over SUV crash in Seminole County last week is expected to speak to reporters today about the accident.
Mark Gerstle, who was driving the Ford Explorer when it overturned about 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, will speak in Orlando this afternoon.
http://touch.orlandosentinel.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-76775613/
The subtle, sexist whispering campaign against Janet Yellen
In conversations with members of the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration, financial reporters and the broader monetary-policy community, I’ve had a surprising number of discussions that follow the same pattern: “Yellen is great,” my interlocutor will say. “But … ”
The “but” is a variation on a theme. She lacks “toughness.” She’s short on “gravitas.” Too “soft-spoken” or “passive.” Some mused that she is not as aggressively brilliant or intellectually probing as other candidates — though they hasten to say she’s clearly very knowledgeable about monetary policy. Others have wondered whether she could handle the inevitable fights with Congress.
Requests for specifics don’t yield much. It’s more a feeling. An intuition. A sense. But these airy hunches are held by powerful people who will be involved, formally and otherwise, in the selection of Bernanke’s replacement.
What the complaints share is an implicit definition of leadership based on stereotypically male qualities. They aren’t qualities that all men have, or all women lack, but they’re qualities that tend to be more rewarded in men than in women, and thus more prevalent among men than women. And because every chairman of the Federal Reserve (as well as every Treasury secretary) has been male, such qualities have steadily, perhaps subconsciously, informed the portrait etched in many minds of high-level economic policy makers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/19/the-subtle-sexist-whispering-campaign-against-janet-yellen/
Obama's pick for the Fed? Larry Summers's Billion-Dollar Bad Bet at Harvard
During the financial crisis, Harvard lost nearly $1 billion because of some unusual and ill-judged interest rate swaps that Summers implemented in the early 2000s during his troubled tenure as the university's president.
Interest rate swaps allow borrowers to lock in a fixed interest rate on floating-rate debt, which can be good to hedge against short-term uncertainty. The problem with Harvard was that Summers wanted to lock in interest rates for money that the university hadn't actually borrowed and wasn't planning on borrowing for a very long time.
There aren't a lot of ways to interpret this exotic instrument except as a bet that the future level of interest rates would be higher than the market pricing implied at the time. That bet was wrong, and Harvard lost a billion dollars. Anonymous finance blogger Epicurean Dealmaker puts it well:
"I have rarely encountered a corporate client who feels confident enough about both their absolute funding needs and current and impending market conditions to enter into a forward swap starting more than nine months into the future. Entering into a forward start swap for debt you do not intend to issue up to 20 years in the future sounds like either rank hubris or free money for Wall Street swap desks."
Why, back in 2004, did Summers feel so confident that interest rates were going to be much higher than they actually were? Reuters blogger Felix Salmon found one clue in a speech Summers gave in October of that year. Among other he things, Summers warned of the dangers created by the U.S. current account deficit and highlighted the seemingly absurd fact that short-term borrowing costs were lower than the rate of inflation. Perhaps Summers's experience with foreign-exchange crises in Asia and Latin America convinced him that something similar could happen in a country that borrowed in its own currency.
Not only was Summers wrong in 2004 about where interest rates would be -- he was willing to bet a lot of other people's money that he knew better than everyone else. The damage at Harvard was bad enough. ***Imagine what that sort of thing could do to the U.S. economy.***
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-18/larry-summers-s-billion-dollar-bad-bet-at-harvard.html
A CEO's-Eye View of ObamaCare
We currently offer all of our more than 21,000 full- and part-time employees at our Carl's Jr. and Hardee's restaurants access to health insurance. At least since 1999, we have offered all of our crew employees access to affordable plans with an annual benefit cap. We currently offer these plans under a waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services, as the ACA prohibits plans with benefit caps.
For restaurant general managers, we offer a more extensive plan where the company pays 60% of the premiums. However, only about 6% of crew-level employees and 60% of general managers sign up for health-insurance coverage.
These low participation rates surprised me. So over the past couple of years I have asked CKE employees what motivated their decisions. Our crew-level workers tend to be younger, and perhaps unsurprisingly some told me they were unconcerned about illness or injury. Others already had insurance through a spouse or parent. A significant number said they declined coverage because they could get medical treatment "for free at the emergency room." Among those who had signed up, many said it was because they were concerned about developing a medical condition (perhaps due to a family history of illness), and then being unable to get affordable coverage due to this pre-existing condition.
These kinds of responses are why I question the ACA's viability. The new law's success depends on young, healthy people who are lower-risk signing up for health insurance to offset the costs of insuring individuals who are at higher risk. If predominantly high-risk individuals sign up, health insurance is going to be very expensive. Yet, even after the ACA takes effect, people will still be able to get medical care at the emergency room. Further, the ACA prohibits insurers from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions. In other words, individuals will no longer have much incentive to get health insurance as a hedge against the possibility of developing a medical condition.
This is why I am concerned that the ACA could actually cause the number of our covered employees to decrease, particularly in the first year. The penalty for declining coverage will be low compared with the cost of coverage; and employees will know that if they happen to get sick, they can get insurance after that. So the economically rational decision for young people, like our crew employees, is to pay the penalty and forego the insurance. Despite what the government may believe, our employees are smart enough to figure this out.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309404578613653344566068.html#printMode
Stem Cells Reprogrammed Using Chemicals Alone
Turning human cells into stem cells without changing their genes could lead to therapies that do not carry a risk of generating mutations.
Scientists have demonstrated a new way to reprogram adult tissue to become cells as versatile as embryonic stem cells—without the addition of extra genes that could increase the risk of dangerous mutations or cancer.
Researchers have been striving to achieve this since 2006, when the creation of so-called induced pluripotent (iPS) cells was first reported. Previously, they had managed to reduce the number of genes needed using small-molecule chemical compounds, but those attempts always required at least one gene, Oct4.
Now, writing in Science, researchers report success in creating iPS cells using chemical compounds only—what they call CiPS cells.
Hongkui Deng, a stem-cell biologist at Peking University in Beijing, and his team screened 10,000 small molecules to find chemical substitutes for the gene. Whereas other groups looked for compounds that would directly stand in for Oct4, Deng's team took an indirect approach: searching for small-molecule compounds that could reprogram the cells in the presence of all the usual genes except Oct4.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stem-cells-reprogrammed-using-chemicals&WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter
Detroit Mayor: More than 100 urban cities having the same problems as Detroit.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing on Sunday left the door open for a federal bailout after the city’s bankruptcy filing, saying the nation’s response would “set a benchmark” for aiding other struggling cities.
Asked directly whether Detroit would seek a federal bailout, Mr. Bing said “not yet.”
“I think it’s very difficult right now to ask directly for support,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“I have gotten great support from this administration. I’ve got great support from a lot of the different departments within the administration,” Mr Bing said of the Obama administration. “They have been helpful, but now that we’ve done our bankruptcy filing, I think we’ve got to take a step back and see what’s next. There’s a lot of conversation, a lot of planning, a lot of negotiations that will go into fixing our city.”
More than 100 urban U.S. cities “are having the same problems we’re having,” Mr. Bing said. “We may be one of the first. We are the largest. But we absolutely will not be the last. And so we have got to set a benchmark in terms how to fix our cities.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/07/21/detroit-mayor-leaves-door-open-for-federal-bailout/?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
Detroit not alone under mountain of long-term debt
From Baltimore to Los Angeles, and many points in between, municipalities are increasingly confronted with how to pay for these massive promises. The Pew Center for the States, in Washington, estimated states’ public pension plans across the U.S. were underfunded by a whopping $1.4 trillion in 2010.
For years, watchdog groups and public-sector analysts have warned of the threat posed by unfunded liabilities. Much like the legacy pension costs that weighed on Detroit’s automakers before the Chrysler and General Motors restructurings of 2009, the worry is that revenues can’t keep up with growing debt and that rosy predictions for market returns downplay the actual financial risk.
As examples of the results: Chicago recently saw its credit rating downgraded because of a $19-billion unfunded pension liability that the ratings service Moody’s puts closer to $36 billion. And Los Angeles could be facing a liability of more than $30 billion, by some estimates.
It’s no surprise — given the pressure public pensions are putting on municipal budgets — that any move to ease those liabilities, especially through a bankruptcy court order like what’s happening in Detroit, is being watched carefully nationwide by state and municipal officials, union leaders, bond traders and retirees.
http://www.freep.com/article/20130721/NEWS06/307210073/
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