| McCain advisor's plan to reduce the number of uninsured Americans: Stop calling them "uninsured." |
Aug 28, 2008 1:45 pm
143 Views |  | Nobody should be surprised by this.
But the real news here is that inexplicably the great genius Goodman hasn't proposed using this measure to instantly reduce the number of American troops who have died in Bush's Iraq disaster to zero.
That's right....
Stop calling the dead ones "dead."
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McCain Adviser's plan to reduce number of uninsured Americans: Stop calling them "uninsured."
BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Amy Weiss
Not only are we a "nation of whiners" in a "mental recession," as McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm says we are, but also according to a different McCain adviser, those of us without health care coverage are NOT uninsured. John Goodman (not the dad on "Roseanne"), president of the right-wing think tank National Center for Policy Analysis and an architect of McCain's health care plan, thinks the health care problem in America is the Census Bureau's fault.
The Dallas Morning News reported:
Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American -- even illegal aliens -- as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.
"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."
According to Mr. Goodman, only people who are denied care are truly uninsured -- everyone who gets care is effectively insured by some mechanism. "So instead of producing worthless statistics that people fling around in vacuous editorials and pointless debates, the Census Bureau should produce meaningful numbers, identifying all of the sources of funds people will draw on if they need medical care," he said.
His comments came in anticipation of a report by the Census Bureau stating that 45.7 million Americans, or 15.3% of the population, were uninsured in 2007.
On his blog, Mr. Goodman negated his own argument by insisting the McCain health plan would reduce the number of uninsured: "[T]he McCain plan would reduce the number of people who lack health insurance by more than half..."
But nobody "lacks health insurance" because they can just go to the emergency room, so what's the point of McCain even having a health care plan? And better yet doesn't that make Goodman's job obsolete? |
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| What a McCain victory would mean |
Aug 26, 2008 2:35 pm
242 Views |  | What a McCain Victory Would Mean
By Robert Parry
August 26, 2008
In judging the shape of a future John McCain presidency, there are already plenty of dots that are easy to connect. They reveal an image of a war-like Empire so full of hubris that it could take the world into a cascade of crises, while extinguishing what is left of the noble American Republic.
McCain has made clear he would continue and even escalate George W. Bush’s open-ended global war on Islamic radicals. McCain buys into the neoconservative vision of expending U.S. treasure and troops to kill as many Muslim militants as possible.
McCain’s tough talk – for instance, his joking about “bomb, bomb Iran” and his vow to pursue Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell” – is indistinguishable from Bush’s “bring ‘em on,” “smoke ‘em out,” “dead or alive” rhetoric.
Beyond the words, McCain’s global war strategy is as hawkish, if not more so, than Bush’s. In late 2001 and early 2002, McCain took the lead in pushing the neocon plan of a rapid pivot from the invasion of Afghanistan toward the prospective invasion of Iraq.
Even before the Taliban had been thoroughly defeated – and as the Bush administration was failing to chase bin Laden to the gates of Tora Bora or to the gates of northwest Pakistan – McCain was advocating a diversion of U.S. intelligence and military assets toward Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11.
That premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq may go down as one of the worst national security blunders in the history of the United States. It has bogged the U.S. military down in two indefinite wars while fueling anti-Americanism around the world and especially among the billion-plus Muslims.
Yet, McCain and his neocon allies have never acknowledged this serious error of judgment, nor has the mainstream U.S. news media demanded that McCain accept responsibility for this catastrophic mistake.
McCain instead gets away with boasting about the supposed success of the recent U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq. (Meanwhile, Big Media stars – many of whom backed the Iraq invasion in 2003 – hammer Barack Obama for refusing to accept the conventional wisdom about the “successful surge,” as Obama tries to offer a more nuanced analysis.)
So, as the U.S. press corps again gives cover to the Iraq War, the larger failure of U.S. policy goes substantially unaddressed.
Not only did the McCain/Bush/neocon strategy allow bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders to survive and reestablish themselves along the Pakistani-Afghan border, the policy let the Taliban exploit instability in Afghanistan to rebuild its forces and begin going on the offensive against hard-pressed U.S. and NATO troops.
Potentially even worse, the Bush-McCain-neocon neglect of Aghanistan has contributed to worsening instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaeda are expanding safe havens and increasing influence.
In other words, while Bush and McCain rushed off to war against Iraq over the distant possibility that Iraq might some day have the capacity to build a nuclear bomb, they allowed disorder to spread in Pakistan, a country that already possesses nuclear weapons.
Future Draft?
Another casualty of McCain’s endless Middle East wars, which soon could include Iran, would almost surely be America’s volunteer army. Though McCain officially opposes a restoration of the draft, it is nearly impossible to envision how his multiple wars could be waged without one.
And McCain also had made clear that he favors a neo-Cold War confrontation with Moscow over another part of the neocon agenda – the encircling of Russia with pro-U.S. regimes and the placement of strategic missile systems near Russia’s borders.
The fencing in of Russia fits with the goals of the neocon Project for the New American Century that envisions an endless era of U.S. military dominance that tolerates no potential rivals, whether an emerging China or a resurgent Russia. The recent Russian-Georgian conflict underscores the risks from this neocon concept.
Containing Russia in this way ultimately would require dangerous brinkmanship. And the McCain/neocon belligerence – like McCain’s melodramatic declaration “we are all Georgians" - [Holy crap! Did crazy SOB McCain really say that? --J.P.] would guarantee that one of these swaggering showdowns eventually would push the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation.
From the perspective of U.S. taxpayers, the neocon strategy of permanent global dominance means funding the military-industrial complex at levels never before seen, especially when one factors in the simultaneous costs of the “war on terror,” the Iraq War, the Afghan War and a possible Iran War.
The combined price tag for McCain’s military adventures, at a time when the federal government is already running about half a trillion dollars in debt, would mean that virtually every other national priority would have to be short-changed or neglected.
There will be little money left to address the energy crisis, global warming, retooling the auto industry, health care, Social Security, education, infrastructure repairs, etc., etc.
Plus, as the United States solidifies itself under President McCain as a militaristic Empire, the remnants of the old Republic would inevitably be swept away.
Already, McCain has vowed to appoint more U.S. Supreme Court justices in the style of Samuel Alito and John Roberts, open advocates of an imperial presidency.
Currently, the Supreme Court has a slim 5-4 majority in favor of maintaining some limits on the President’s power. But one more vacancy from the moderate majority – to be filled by President McCain – would mean that a right-wing Supreme Court would begin reinterpreting the U.S. Constitution to grant the President unlimited powers in wartime.
And since wartime would never end, the Founders’ vision of a Republic – with “checks and balances” and all people possessing “unalienable rights” – would be negated by an all-powerful President who could do whatever he wished to anyone who got in the way.
In many ways, a McCain presidency would represent the logical culmination of America’s failure to heed President Dwight Eisenhower’s parting warning about the growing power of “the military-industrial complex.”
The American people also would show that they had turned their back on another warning from another aging leader, Benjamin Franklin, who cautioned at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the Founders had created a Republic, “...if you can keep it.”
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book is Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. |
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| Jumpy John McCain can't remember how many houses he owns |
Aug 21, 2008 10:39 am
83 Views |  | Turns out it's ten houses, actually.
Now you see why Jumpy John dumped disfigured Car Crash Carol so he could marry Budweiser Babe Beer Barrel Baroness Cindy.
Cindy is 17 years Jumpy John's junior.
It might have been in better taste for J. J. to wait for his divorce from Carol before getting the marriage license to close the deal on Cindy. I guess Jumpy was in a hurry and not taking any chances she'd meet someone younger.
From HiffingtonPost
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Uh Cindy, duh, how many fuggin' houses do we own, anyway? I lost count again.
John McCain said in an interview with Politico on Wednesday "that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own."
"I think -- I'll have my staff get to you," McCain said. "It's condominiums where -- I'll have them get to you."
The answer, according to the group Progressive Accountability, is an even 10 homes, ranches, condos, and lofts, together worth a combined estimated $13,823,269.
John and Cindy McCain own a plethora of houses spread throughout the United States, including: two beachfront condos in Coronado, California, condo in La Jolla, California, a two-unit condominium complex in Phoenix, Arizona, three ranch houses located outside of Sedona, Arizona, a high-rise condo in Arlington, Virginia, a rental loft, and, according to GQ, a loft they bought for their daughter, Meghan.
As Politico notes, McCain's comments are a serious potential gaffe, as they dovetail with an increasingly aggressive effort to paint the GOP nominee as wildly out of touch on economic issues.
In recent weeks, Democrats have stepped up their effort to caricature McCain as living an outlandishly rich lifestyle -- a bit of payback to the GOP for portraying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as an elitist, and for turning the spotlight in 2004 on the five homes owned by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.
Pro-Obama labor groups have sent out mailers highlighting McCain's wealth, and prominent Democrats have included references to it in comments to reporters.
Twice in the past two weeks, those Democrats have focused on McCain's houses.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told Politico's Ben Smith that it was McCain "who wears $500 shoes, has six houses and comes from one of the richest families in his state."
And David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, referred in an interview with Adam Nagourney of The New York Times to an imagined meeting of McCain strategists "on the portico of the McCain estate in Sedona -- or maybe in one of his six other houses." |
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| The Real McCain: Former POW and Naval Academy classmate of John McCain |
Aug 20, 2008 11:02 am
272 Views |  | From the AlterNet site.
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The Real McCain, according to fellow Vietnam POW and U.S. Naval Academy classmate Phillip Butler
Fellow Naval Academy classmate and POW of John McCain Phillip Butler is now saying the Great Unmentionable.
*****
John was a wild man. He was funny, with a quick wit and he was intelligent. But he was intent on breaking every USNA regulation in our 4 inch thick USNA Regulations book. And I believe he must have come as close to his goal as any midshipman who ever attended the Academy. John had me "coming around" to his room frequently during my plebe year. And on one occasion he took me with him to escape "over the wall" in the dead of night. He had a taxi cab waiting for us that took us to a bar some 7 miles away. John had a few beers, but forbid me to drink (watching out for me I guess) and made me drink cokes. I could tell many other midshipman stories about John that year and he unbelievably managed to graduate though he spent the majority of his first class year on restriction for the stuff he did get caught doing. In fact he barely managed to graduate, standing 5th from the bottom of his 800 man graduating class. I and many others have speculated that the main reason he did graduate was because his father was an Admiral, and also his grandfather, both U.S. Naval Academy graduates
[...]
John was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for heroism and wounds in combat. This heroism has been played up in the press and in his various political campaigns. But it should be known that there were approximately 600 military POW's in Vietnam. Among all of us, decorations awarded have recently been totaled to the following: Medals of Honor - 8, Service Crosses - 42, Silver Stars - 590, Bronze Stars - 958 and Purple Hearts - 1,249. John certainly performed courageously and well. But it must be remembered that he was one hero among many - not uniquely so as his campaigns would have people believe.
I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.
Most of us who survived that experience are now in our late 60's and 70's. Sadly, we have died and are dying off at a greater rate than our non-POW contemporaries. We experienced injuries and malnutrition that are coming home to roost. So I believe John's age (73) and survival expectation are not good for being elected to serve as our President for 4 or more years.
I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head. He has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button.
It is also disappointing to see him take on and support Bush's war in Iraq, even stating we might be there for another 100 years. For me John represents the entrenched and bankrupt policies of Washington-as-usual. The past 7 years have proven to be disastrous for our country. And I believe John's views on war, foreign policy, economics, environment, health care, education, national infrastructure and other important areas are much the same as those of the Bush administration.
*****
Wow. It's stunning to see someone who knows McCain lay this all out so specifically. And he hits everything -- the age, the temper, the flyboy antics, the policies right in line with Bush. It's all there.
He should have some fun with his newfound not-stardom, with all the not-appearing on corporate news programs and not-being cited in the corporate print media. |
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| John McCain's Georgia war: playing with nuclear fire |
Aug 19, 2008 1:43 pm
154 Views | From the truthout site.
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John McCain is playing with nuclear fire
by Steve Weissman
John McCain calls the conflict in Georgia "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War," and he is doing everything he can to make it his own, even at the cost of upstaging the shrinking President Bush. But the tragedy in Georgia also reveals the most embarrassing foreign policy blunder since - well, since the Bush administration decided to wage a preemptive war in Iraq. If deep thinkers in Washington insist on setting up a string of client states to encircle Russia, they should never let the puppets pull their own strings, as [Georgian President] Mikheil Saakashvili appears to have done when he sent his army into rebellious South Ossetia.
Certainly, the Russian bullies were just waiting to pounce on any provocation, but that is precisely the point. Never provoke unless you are prepared to respond, and don't leave the decision to "the help." Every day the crisis continues, Washington looks more foolish, huffing and puffing and mouthing demands that no one - least of all the Russians - take as anything but Cold War rhetoric. This could lead to dangerous miscalculations on all sides, yet no one in our dumbed-down imperium seems likely ever to be held to account.
Who let Saakashvili off the leash? Who in the White House, Pentagon or McCain campaign led him to believe that Washington would send in the cavalry to save him? And how is it in our national interest to build up the local armies, navies and air forces in Georgia, Ukraine and so many other countries along Russia's border?
As for the Georgians, the blunder has already brought them a terrible loss of life, limb and property, and they will almost certainly lose the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As with Kosovo, so much for the shibboleth of "territorial integrity." The excitable Saakashvili may also have scared neighboring Turkey and others in NATO whose backing he would need to join the alliance, though McCain's neoconservative backers at The Weekly Standard are suggesting that Washington help create an Eastern European Security Alliance, which could bring the entire region under the US nuclear umbrella.
The Bush administration also played with nuclear fire, rushing to announce that the United States had signed a controversial agreement to install anti-missile missiles in Poland, ostensibly to defend against "rogue nations" like Iran. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev responded by repeating that the missiles in Poland would target Russia, while the deputy chief of Russia's armed forces threatened Poland with nuclear annihilation. It truly is déjà vu all over again, but with one major difference. This time the Russians - and the Chinese - have good reason to fear the worst, as the authoritative American journal Foreign Affairs made clear in March 2006.
"Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy," wrote Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press. "It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike."
The authors document at length exactly how this happened. But, in brief, the story is this: Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has greatly augmented the strength and smarts of its nuclear arsenal, while the Russians have let theirs decline precipitously and the Chinese have moved to modernize theirs at a "glacial pace." I expect that America's heated verbal response to events in Georgia will encourage both Russia and China to try to catch up at whatever cost. But, for the foreseeable future, the Russians and Chinese can no longer count on nuclear deterrence through mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Is this good or bad? That depends on how one views American power. "Hawks, who believe that the United States is a benevolent force in the world, will welcome the new nuclear era because they trust that US dominance in both conventional and nuclear weapons will help deter aggression by other countries," write Lieber and Press. "But doves, who oppose using nuclear threats to coerce other states and fear an emboldened and unconstrained United States, will worry. Nuclear primacy might lure Washington into more aggressive behavior, they argue, especially when combined with US dominance in so many other dimensions of national power."
Though I have never much liked the labels, I fully share what the authors view as a dovish fear, especially now that Bush and McCain have embraced the right to wage preemptive war. I also suspect that the new nuclear reality played a role in creating the current tragedy in Georgia. Without the testosterone of nuclear dominance, Washington would have paid far greater heed to Russian fears of encirclement, and might have been less reckless in encouraging a hotheaded ultranationalist like Saakashvili.
Russia, on the other hand, has made its move in an area where America's nuclear superiority counts far less than our current lack of conventional forces and international legitimacy. As they have so often in the past, the Russians are playing from weakness, not from strength, which opens the door for a fundamental rethinking. Should the United States and its NATO allies increase military pressure on the Russians, as now seems likely? Or, would it make more sense to work with the Russians to demilitarize their borderlands and keep the area from becoming a tripwire for unending confrontation with all the risk of a nuclear miscalculation?
I know McCain's answer. I would like to hear Obama's.
****
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. | |
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| The McCain campaign is very likely behind the "war" in Georgia |
Aug 16, 2008 8:13 am
209 Views | How do you win an election when you deserve to lose by a landslide? You cheat. What's a good way to cheat? Get your flunky's ex-boss to start a war.
Say you're a cadaverous Republican relic like John McCain is. And you're running against a dynamic opponent who is 25 years younger than you are. In a mess like that, nothing beats playing tough guy. That's where this sudden "war" in Georgia comes in.
Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign-policy advisor, happens to be a former lobbyist for Georgia. So McCain gets Scheunemann to convince Georgia's president Saakashvili that invading Ossetia is a good idea. The Bush White House helps out too, with Dumbbell sending Condi Rice over there to glare at the cameras and scold Russia's Vladimir Putin for being ... wait for it ... evil.
McCain and Bush have to to hope Putin doesn't laugh at them. Or even worse, call their silly bluff. And Putin must be sorely tempted to do both. He, like most of the world, probably thinks George Bush is way overdue for having his hostile attitude shoved forcibly down his throat.
After 5 1/2 years in Iraq, the American military is quite incapable of taking on the 1.5 million man Russian army. Because Bush has broken our armed forces, we would get our ass kicked over there, and badly.
Of course, the peons back home (that's us) aren't supposed to know any of that.
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Is the Georgia war a neocon election ploy?
By Robert Scheer
Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign.
In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia’s membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.
Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.
McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.
What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a “revanchist Russia” that should once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people.
How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori they would have found a museum still honoring the local boy, who made good by seizing control of the Russian revolution. Indeed five Russian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori’s Stalin Square on Tuesday.
It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the United States, which championed Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, now is ignoring Georgia’s invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces.
For McCain to so fervently embrace Scheunemann’s neoconservative line of demonizing Russia in the interest of appearing tough during an election campaign is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly irresponsible.
Mr. Scheer is a former Los Angeles Times columnist. | |
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| Solar collector could make roads into renewable energy source |
Aug 14, 2008 2:09 pm
138 Views | From ScienceDaily.
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Solar collector could make roads into renewable energy source
ScienceDaily, Aug. 14, 2008 — Anyone who has walked barefoot across a parking lot on a hot summer day knows that blacktop is exceptionally good at soaking up the sun’s warmth. Now, a research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute [WPI] has found a way to use that heat-soaking property for an alternative energy source.
The research project, which was undertaken at the request of Michael Hulen, president of Novotech Inc. in Acton, Mass, which holds a patent on the concept of using the heat absorbed by pavements, is being directed by Rajib Mallick, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
On Monday, Aug. 18, 2008, team member Bao-Liang Chen, a PhD candidate at WPI, will present the results of research aimed at evaluating the potential for transforming stretches of asphalt into a cost-effective energy source at the annual symposium of the International Society for Asphalt Pavements in Zurich, Switzerland. The study looks not only at how well asphalt can collect solar energy, but at the best way to construct roads and parking lots to maximize their heat-absorbing qualities.
“Asphalt has a lot of advantages as a solar collector,” Mallick says. “For one, blacktop stays hot and could continue to generate energy after the sun goes down, unlike traditional solar-electric cells. In addition, there is already a massive acreage of installed roads and parking lots that could be retrofitted for energy generation, so there is no need to find additional land for solar farms. Roads and lots are typically resurfaced every 10 to 12 years and the retrofit could be built into that cycle. Extracting heat from asphalt could cool it, reducing the urban ‘heat island’ effect. Finally, unlike roof-top solar arrays, which some find unattractive, the solar collectors in roads and parking lots would be invisible.”
Mallick and his research team, which also includes Sankha Bhowmick of UMass, Dartmouth, studied the energy-generating potential of asphalt using computer models and by conducting small- and large-scale tests. The tests were conducted on slabs of asphalt in which were imbedded thermocouples, to measure heat penetration, and copper pipes, to gauge how well that heat could be transferred to flowing water. Hot water flowing from an asphalt energy system could be used “as is” for heating buildings or in industrial processes, or could be passed through a thermoelectric generator to produce electricity.
In the lab, small slabs were exposed to halogen lamps, simulating sunlight. Larger slabs were set up outdoors and exposed to more realistic environmental conditions, including direct sunlight and wind. The tests showed that asphalt absorbs a considerable amount of heat and that the highest temperatures are found a few centimeters below the surface. This is where a heat exchanger would be located to extract the maximum amount of energy. Experimenting with various asphalt compositions, they found that the addition of highly conductive aggregates, like quartzite, can significantly increase heat absorption, as can the application of a special paint that reduces reflection.
Finally, Mallick says the team concluded that the key to successfully turning asphalt into an effective energy generator will replacing the copper pipes used in the tests with a specially designed, highly efficient heat exchanger that soaks up the maximum amount of the heat absorbed by asphalt. “Our preliminary results provide a promising proof of concept for what could be a very important future source of renewable, pollution-free energy for our nation. And it has been there all along, right under our feet.
Adapted from materials provided by Worcester Polytechnic Institute. | |
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| Deployed troops give money to Obama over McCain by 6 - 1 margin |
Aug 14, 2008 1:54 pm
238 Views |  | Makes sense to me. McCain will hang the troops out to dry forever, but Obama says he'll being them home. From the OpenSecrets site.
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Deployed Troops Contribute to Obama Over McCain by 6 - 1 Margin
According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain's haul.
Despite McCain's status as a decorated veteran and a historically Republican bent among the military, members of the armed services overall -- whether stationed overseas or at home -- are also favoring Obama with their campaign contributions in 2008, by a $55,000 margin. Although 59 percent of federal contributions by military personnel has gone to Republicans this cycle, of money from the military to the presumed presidential nominees, 57 percent has gone to Obama.
How does that stack up against previous years?
"That's shocking. The academic debate is between some who say that junior enlisted ranks lean slightly Republican and some who say it's about equal, but no one would point to six-to-one" in Democrats' favor, said Aaron Belkin, a professor of political science at the University of California who studies the military. "That represents a tremendous shift from 2000, when the military vote almost certainly was decisive in Florida and elsewhere, and leaned heavily towards the Republicans."
In 2000, Republican George W. Bush outraised Democrat Al Gore among military personnel almost 2 to 1. In 2004, with the Iraq war underway, John Kerry closed the gap with President Bush, but Bush still raised $1.50 from the military for every $1 his Democratic opponent collected.
The real question is this - is this indicative of a trend in support for Obama across the armed services (enlisted and officers)? And if so, does it translate into votes? It certainly does go along way towards Republicans claims to speak for (and have the backing of) the troops. |
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| Airlines may charge extra for fully qualified flight crews |
Aug 5, 2008 10:51 am
293 Views | The Airline Transport Association (ATA) said today that some U.S. air carriers are quietly looking into charging passengers a premium for having cockpit crews with first-rate qualifications assigned to their flights.
ATA spokesman Herb "Crash" Kaputnick explained that carriers are considering a two-tier system of standard and premium flights. Kaputnick indicated that flight crews assigned to standard flights could include members "in not necessarily perfect compliance" with FAA pilot medical standards and state and/or federal alcohol, drunk-driving, firearms and controlled-substance laws.
Kaputnick stressed that it will not be any airline's policy to intentionally bar well qualified crewmembers from standard-tier flights. Crew assignments will be based on passengers' willingness to pony up prior to boarding.
"Don't you smartass reporters give people the idea we're rounding up junkies, heart-transplant patients and winos and pouring them into the captain's seat," Kaputnick demanded. He said airlines will make a "good effort" toward the safe conduct of each flight.
Kaputnick said "very strict" measures will ensure each crewmember is fit for duty. "Absolutely no personnel unable to reach the plane under their own power will be allowed in the cockpit under any circumstances," he said.
According to Kaputnick, crew members unable to walk to or find the aircraft unassisted will be given vouchers for a meal in an airport restaurant, including "lots of good, strong coffee," and will not be permitted to fly till at least an hour later.
Appearing exasperated by the line of questioning, Kaputnick said, "You people should lighten up. Fuel costs a fortune and airlines are just trying to stay competitive. Last I looked, flying still beats walking." | |
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