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have to wonder if Carlyle had any influence...
just ok? The only story I've heard so far is about the female snow boarder who blew it right near the end of the course... one of those agony of defeat moments.
how are the Olympics?
McPherson gives conditional OK to Diebold voting machines
<< I've been so busy I almost missed this... you better believe this guy is getting letters and calls from me... and will not receive any re-election votes from me unless he reverses his decision... of course, why does he care now that the vote can be fixed? >>
<< and from a programmer's persepctive... what an idiot to say they are okay but just need more coding changes... that's part of the whole point. plus I see no mention of requiring audits, paper backup or anything like that. grrrr! >>
Friday, February 17, 2006
(02-17) 18:53 PST SACRAMENTO, (AP) --
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson gave conditional approval Friday for counties to use two voting machines produced by Diebold Election Systems that he had previously questioned.
McPherson's office said in December that the Diebold machines failed one of the 10 criteria he established for voting machines because the source coding, or computer language, on their memory cards was not reviewed by independent investigators.
The coding performs two critical tasks — securing ballot entries and later providing instructions to election officials on how to access and tally the votes.
Since then, Diebold submitted the machines to further testing by University of California, Berkeley security analysts, who concluded that some of the codes on the memory cards need to be rewritten for long-term use.
Any immediate worries can be addressed by ensuring there is strict security during voting, the analysts said.
McPherson said the review persuaded him to authorize Diebold's Optical Scan and Touch-Screen voting systems, as long as counties take additional security precautions, including resetting the programmed code on the machines and keeping a written log of who has control of the memory cards.
Diebold is still required to make the long-term programming changes then resubmit the machines for independent testing.
Several California counties had already purchased the machines and some used them in November's statewide special election. The machines were designed to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which in part was intended to phase out punch card ballots and other old-fashioned systems as well as standardize electronic voting systems.
In an effort to meet federal requirements that take effect next year, McPherson's office has been engaged for months in evaluating and certifying several different electronic voting machines, including those from Diebold. The North Canton, Ohio-based company is the nation's largest manufacturer of such machines.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/02/17/state/n175845S67.DTL&hw=diebold&...
so true
truly scary!
LOL! I don't believe it.
Benjamin Franklin
PBS mini series on DVD... excellent biography!
warning: 3hrs 30mins
true... common sense and common courtesy
the whole incident is fishy...
what bothered me was hearing the guy apology to Cheney's family for what this put them through... that didn't sound right at all!
yup... it's a good analogy for how he's managed his vice presidency... he gives the US a bad name
that should be illegal
it would solve nothing and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people...what a moronic statement
There are many people that have bullets/fragments left in them.
it can cause problems later on... my father had some shrapnel in his leg that bothered him in later years.
ROFL!!!
that part sounds good.
just for me alone I pay about double that per year.
fair enough :)
thanks.
according to it you don't lose it, it rolls over year to year and gets interest. BUT you still pay most of the insurance premium and have very high deductibles. And I love the decreasing term death benefit. PLUS it's not clear that your heirs actually will inherit the money in the savings plan at death.
It just looks like another insurance company gimick... they charge you the similar amount in premium, charge a higher deductible, and get the benefit of holding all those funds for you...
I'm not impressed. It doesn't solve any of the problems related to why most people don't have insurance coverage.
I think they should live up to the promises made to those who have been working most of their lives and putting money into it... and it probably needs some sort of reform. That said, I'm trying not to count on getting it... it's a matter of practically... it may not be there because Bush and Congress are blowing the budget.
it'll probably be like social security... you get to put all the money in but probably won't it back when you need it. Why should we ever trust their promises again?
I'd like to see more info... do you have a link to details of the plan?
I can't believe she's 38 already
Besides that, what happens to the money if you never use it? Do your heirs inherit it or does it go back to the insurer or government?
guess I'm suspicious...
Is that like a flex spending account and if you don't use it, you lose it?
LOL!
I had the previous prez of the company I use to work for say about the same thing and offered to give me his accountants name. I tell mine to do my taxes exactly accurate.
Frankly, the IRS scares the crap out of me and I never want to give them an excuse to notice me.
You have to own alot more than I did to have the dividends help make ends meet. Again, I think only the more well to do own enough of a stock like that to see a big impact on an increase in dividends.
I agree, but don't you think it makes sense to prioritize doing the one that is both easier to identify and larger in amount? Isn't that how you run your business?
Nutra Sweet always gives me a headache... I stay away from all artificial sweetners.
guess they are still around :)
http://www.wallenda.com/
I wonder what ever happened to the flying Wallendas...
just from a cost effective point of view, it would be easier to repeal that law giving a few large oil companies trillions, than to track down the trillion not reported on tax returns. That doesn't mean I don't think they should go after people who cheat on taxes, but from a strictly fiscal point of view, let's get the big items first.
Personally, I don't fudge one tiny bit on my taxes... would be interesting to do an anonymous a poll on this board.
yeah right...
I inherited some XOM from my mother... I sold it out of conscience.
ROFL! good one
time to repeal that law, don't you think?
a billion here, a billion there...
yup. nobody around here seems concerned about it unless it was actually being spent to help the less fortunate in this country... I guess it's okay to give it to big oil companies to help make their execs even more wealthy.
U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.
Royalty-Free Oil and Gas New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.
Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
"We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given," said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. "It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people."
But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.
Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.
Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.
Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.
In what administration officials and industry executives alike view as a major test case, Kerr-McGee told the Interior Department last week that it planned to challenge one of the government's biggest limitations on royalty relief if it could not work out an acceptable deal in its favor. If Kerr-McGee is successful, administration projections indicate that about 80 percent of all oil and gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico would be royalty-free.
"It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."
Republican lawmakers are also concerned about how the royalty relief program is working out.
"I don't think there is a single member of Congress who thinks you should get royalty relief at $70 a barrel" for oil, said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee.
"It was Congress's intent," Mr. Pombo said in an interview on Friday, "that if oil was at $10 a barrel, there should be royalty relief so companies could have some kind of incentive to invest capital. But at $70 a barrel, don't expect royalty relief."
Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said Monday that the giveaways might turn out to be less than the basic forecasts indicate because of "certain variables."
The government does not disclose how much individual companies benefit from the incentives, and most companies refuse to disclose either how much they pay in royalties or how much they are allowed to avoid.
But the benefits are almost entirely for gas and oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico.
The biggest producers include Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil as well as smaller independent companies like Anadarko and Devon Energy.
Executives at some companies, including Exxon Mobil, said they had already stopped claiming royalty relief because they knew market prices had exceeded the government's price triggers.
About one-quarter of all oil and gas produced in the United States comes from federal lands and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
As it happens, oil and gas royalties to the government have climbed much more slowly than market prices over the last five years.
continued...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/business/14oil.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
I never let my kids get away with the "but so and so did it too" excuse...
amazing how many adults try using it as well