Spitzer is gone will Vitter follow?

After years of Spitzer's holier then thou attitude, the Governor of New York announces his resignation at a press conference.
Eliot Spitzer (Client # 9) with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, at his side, announced that His resignation will take effect on Monday. For those with out a TV, comes two days after news broke that he had been a customer of a very high price prostitution ring.

Spitzer's resignation call into question when David Vitter will also drop out of his position in the senate.
This after his phone number showed up on a list of phone records in the case against Deborah
Jeane Palfrey, aka "the D.C. Madam."
The list of politicians disgraced in sex scandals is a long one, including some of the very "Founding Fathers" of this country.


Republican Senate. Larry Craig, ( Wide- Stance ) of Idaho, in August 2008, pleaded guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct in a sting that targeted Gay sex in a Minneapolis men's airport bathroom.

Republican Rep. Mark Foley, of -Florida., resigned last fall after it was discovered he was sending sexually explicit messages to underage male pages.

Republican James McGreevey resigned as the governor of New Jersey in November 2004 after admitting to an affair with a male employee.

Democrat President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath in a probe into his extramarital affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. This leaving parent everywhere
trying to explain to their 10 year old children, why "The Blue Dress" was important in the case.

Republican Senator Bob Packwood, Ore., in 1995 resigned his seat after being accused of sexual misconduct by 29 women. Creating an income stream for those that
offer Sexual Harassment sensitivity classes .
Republican Rep. Donald Lukens, of Ohio, was convicted for paying a 16-year-old girl to have sex with him in 1988

These are just a fraction of those that one could list. Clearly these actions are taking place of both sides of the "Left" and "Right" These acts seem to come up so often that they almost seem like part of the job description.

It is sad to see a man's life time of hard work flushed down the drain, but he is the one that pulled the lever.


Larry Lubell
www.UrbanInsuranceAgency.com

Is Michael Moore trying to make the "Left" look bad?

Moore Says Bring Castro to the Oscars

Michael Moore, the director behind "Sicko" and Roger and me joked that Fidel Castro should be invited to the Sunday night's Academy Awards show.
"I think it would be a "ratings grabber" said Moore.
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Personaly I think he's right, it would get many people to tune in, but perhaps not as many as would tune in to see Moore get carted off to a Cuban jail.

6 Dead at Northern Illinois University

For the forth time in one week, a gunman opened fire at a US school.Today, Thursday, a gunman, identified Stephen Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. according to university President John Peters, "As many as 18 people were injured, then The shooter took his own life.He described the scene aftermath of the incident as terrifying and chaotic."Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor, a senior geography student, said outside just minutes after the shooting occurred. "It was like five minutes before class ended too."Witnesses said the young man carried a shotgun and a pistol. Mr. Robinson, another student at the scene commented, "It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot," Robinson said. "He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at."Another student in the hall, Jillian Martinez, described how the gunman came into the hall by the lectern and just started shooting."He just started shooting at all the kids," she said. "He just started shooting at people, and I ran out of there as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the student center; when I got there I could still hear shooting.Thomas Ahern, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said he did not know what his motive might have been.authorities said they found out Two of the weapons — the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun — were purchased legally less than a week ago, on Feb. 9th. Kazmierczak had a valid Firearm Owner's Identification Card, which is required for all Illinois residents who buy or possess firearms.Campus Police Chief Donald Grady told investigators, "He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,"The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a week. It makes one ask... what is wrong with us as a society?This is an enormous tragedy. As a parent, I can feel for the loss that the families of the victims are experiencing, yet I not truly imagine that level of pain. You work hard, make sacrifices needed to send your child to college, and then in a second, the 're gone. It must feel as if all of the air had been sucked out of your world, that the sun and starts stopped shining, and all that is left is darkness and pain.

In an attempt to understand, I am left with some questions:
Why are these tragedies happening in ever increasing frequency? And why are people with know mental problems able to go out and load up on weapons? What happened to the idea of a 7 day waiting period?

I have great respect for people on all sides of the political fence, but clearly our system is broken. We can not keep allowing mentally unstable people to go out at a moments notice and fill their shopping cart up with guns.
Larry Lubell

Metabolic Syndrome, Are zero calorie sodas making us fat?

As a person that consumes embarrassing amounts of Diet Coke, I have to say that I found the following article quite interesting.After traveling around Europe, it is hard not to notice that their people seem less likely to be consuming “Diet Foods” yet also seem to be less likely to be “Over Weight”. I have never heard an American visit France and not return asking the question, "Why can the people of France eat rich cheese and Chocolate mouse and yet not have the same health issues that we do in the States?" "After all, we are the ones eating “Low Fat” this and “Diet” that."

Maybe this is a big part of the answer.

Metabolic Syndrome Is Tied to Diet Soda
The New York Times
Posted: 2008-02-07 14:01:41
Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome -- the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels -- and elevated blood pressure.

The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years.Over all, a Western dietary pattern -- high intakes of refined grains, fried foods and red meat -- was associated with an 18 percent increased risk for metabolic syndrome, while a "prudent" diet dominated by fruits, vegetables, fish and poultry correlated with neither an increased nor a decreased risk.

But the one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none."This is interesting," said Lyn M. Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the paper, which was posted online in the journal Circulation on Jan. 22. "Why is it happening? Is it some kind of chemical in the diet soda, or something about the behavior of diet soda drinkers?"

It is naive not to recognize that the role that portion size, exercise and even sleep patterns play in the greater rate of obesity in the United States.
That said, it is getting harder and harder not to look at the liquid portion of our daily consumption. There is a growing chorus of voices singing a worrying tune about both
artificial sweeteners as well as high fructose corn syrup.

To see just how prevalent these ingredients are- go through the drink section of your local supermarket and read the labels.

The question is how look will it take for me to, not just reduce, but stop drinking all that Diet Coke?

By Larry Lubell
UrbanBlog

Bigfoot on Mars?

Boy that Big Foot sure gets around.

Just when you were thinking maybe we heard the last of him -
Wham, he turns up on Mars.

Sure NASA tells us it's just a rock. but who are you going to trust, Scores of scientists using sophisticated equipment, or your own eyes.

Remember, NASA is still trying to tell us that there are no UFOs.

I wonder if we'll find the Loch Ness Monster living on Europa

News

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Global Warming… Fact or Fiction

When scientists look back over the 4.6 billion year history of Earth it is clear that the climate has changed many times, ranging from ice ages to long periods of warmth. Throughout time, natural forces including major volcanic eruptions, small fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, solar cycles, and even asteroid impacts have affected the Earth's climate. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th late century, human actions have also changed the composition of the atmosphere. By burning Fossil fuels for energy man is increasing the amount of carbon and Methane in the atmosphere. and therefore likely are influencing the Earth's climate.

Carbon is called a “Greenhouse” gas because it works in the atmosphere in a similar way that the panes of glass work in a greenhouse. They allow the sunlight (Ultra-violet rays) to enter warming the ground and air. Then the resulting inferred energy is trapped inside causing the room (or planet) to heat up. Global warming is the result of more energy coming in, than what is able to leave. If greenhouse gases continue to increase, climate models predict that the average temperature at the Earth's surface could increase from 2.5 to 10.4ºF above 1990 levels by the end of this century. Scientists are certain that human activities are changing the composition of the atmosphere, and that increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases will change the planet’s climate. We all have a vested interest in the “Status Quo”

I have to laugh when I hear people talk about “Saving the Planet”, with the exception of an Everest sized asteroid hitting Earth; our planet is pretty safe form the next few billion years. The Earth does not care if the oceans are 30 feet higher or 10 degrees warmer. For more than one billion years the earth had no oxygen. The simple truth is we all have a vested interest in the “Status Quo.” The Earth does not care what the coastline is but if you just paid $900,000.00 for a condo in South Beach, you do not want to see it washed out to sea.

Every scientist working in climatology will tell you just how complicated and difficult it is to create a climate model. Even the most advanced super computers with thousands of parallel processors are only able to scratch the surface of the data required to generate a complete picture. So anyone who says they “Know” the precise future of the Earths next 100 years of climate in delusional, but history and reasonable projections give us insight into the direction we appear to be headed.In the film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth”, the former Vice President, Al Gore lays out a tail of Earth’s recent past and possible near term future. The question is how accurate are some of the scientific claims made in the documentary?

In an attempt to clear the air, National Geographic News checked in with Eric Steig, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who saw An Inconvenient Truth at a preview screening.He says the documentary handles the science well.“I was looking for errors,” he said.“But nothing much struck me as overblown or wrong.”Claim: Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense as temperatures rise.“There’s no question about this,” the University of Washington»s Steig said. “If the average is going up, the extremes have to go up as well.”2005 was the hottest year on Earth since the late 19th century, when scientists began collecting temperature data. And Britain»s Meteorological Office said there was a 60 percent probability that 2007 would break that record. The past decade featured five of the warmest years ever recorded, with the second hottest year being 1998. (Article continues below)

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Claim: Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet (6 meters) with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.There is little doubt that sea levels would rise by that much if Greenland melted.Reduction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets similar to past reductions would cause sea level to rise 10 or more meters. A sea-level rise of 10 meters would flood about 25 percent of the U.S. population, with the major impact being mostly on the people and infrastructures in the Gulf and East Coast.All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines.“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
“That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Dr. Boggild said. “If you lose that much volume you»d definitely see new islands appear.”
“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.
On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
“Here in Miami,” Dr. Leatherman said, “we»re going to have an ocean on both sides of us.”
Claim: The Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2050.Some climate models are more conservative, suggesting that there will be no summer ice in the Arctic by the year 2100.But new research shows it could take as little as 20 years for the sea ice to disappear.“Since the advent of remote satellite imaging, we»ve lost about 20 percent of sea-ice cover,” said Mark Serreze, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.“We»re setting ourselves up for very big losses this year.”“We think of the Arctic as the heat sink to the climate system,” Serreze said.“We»re fundamentally changing this heat sink, and we don’t know how the rest of the climate system is going to respond.”There is no doubt that as sea ice continues to melt, habitat for animals like polar bears will continue to shrink.
In addition to the legitimate complexity of environmental models, you also have some companies funding reseach explicitly for the purpose of “Throwing up smoke,” in order to create the illusion that the scientific community is more divided than is actually the case. Of these companies Exxon has been the largest funding source for data contrary to the main wave of the scientific community.Therefore it was noteworthy when Exxon announced it had stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank that last year ran television ads saying that carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is helpful. After funding them previously, Exxon decided in late 2005 not to fund for 2006 CEI and “five or six” other groups active in the global-warming debate,said Kenneth Cohen, Exxon»s vice president for public affairs.Exxon says important questions remain about the degree to which fossil-fuel emissions are contributing to global warming. But “the modeling has gotten better” analyzing the probabilities of how rising greenhouse-gas emissions will affect global temperatures, Mr. Cohen said. Exxon continues to stress the modeling is imperfect; it is “helpful to an analysis, but it»s not a predictor,” he said. But he added, “we know enough now - or, society knows enough now - that the risk is serious and action should be taken.”
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