Obama on the ever dying roads and bridges

In October of 2008, candidate Obama told us that we needed to fix our crumbling infrastructure.  We had too many "roads and bridges" that needed repair.
What was needed was some kind of... stimulus...

So naturally, being sheep, we passed a nearly $800 BILLION stimulus program that included about $400 BILLION of spending to fix our roads and bridges.
Oh wait.
Who am I kidding?
This is the democrat party. If you solve a problem, you can't come back a few years later and repeat what the problem is, and say that you need to spend money on it.
"There are so many roads and bridges waiting to be repaired, and rebuilt..."



Well hell. At least after that money was spent, we were able to finally fix our roads and bridges problem.
Right?
oh.
2013:
Okay... we FINALLY got the roads and bridges problem fixed.
Yes?
Oh fuck.
2015:

In any other presidency, the president would get called out for constantly repeating the same refrain in an effort to get more spending.
Not this guy. Not this president.
He's special.
We know that, because he appears on late night television shows, sports broadcasts, and basically anywhere that you can find a camera.
But he has a point. We need to spend money on roads, bridges, and anything else that will help us transport people from one part of the country to another. Perhaps we could go about putting a special agency, and fund it every year with the express purpose of doing those things. We could call it... I dunno... a Transportation Department?
Yes, a Department of Transportation!
We could fund it every year, and task it with the job of taking care of such things.  And since its a government department, it will do an amazing job of taking care of such things!  And maybe we could give it roughly $70 billion dollars a year to play with, just to build roads and bridges?

If only such a thing existed, our president wouldn't have to keep insisting that our roads and bridges crumble ever couple of years...

When tornadoes don't strike, like they're supposed to

You've heard it before: our temperature increases, and it results in more extreme weather.  The IPCC has been talking about this for... forever. In 2007, NASA told us that Global Warming would bring about more tornadoes.
ThinkProgress dumbly echoed this last year.
(Sidenote; I'm being redundant when I say that ThinkProgress dumbly did anything.)

Of course, the AGW crowd has also been talking about 50 million people being displaced by 2011 as a result of global warming, and that never happened either.

With all of that in mind, USAToday just told us that the last 3 years have had the lowest amount of tornadoes on record.

The U.S. experienced fewer tornadoes in the past three years than any similar span since accurate records began in the 1950s. Yet meteorologists aren't sure exactly why.

Neat.
Once again, the AGW scientists confidently predict doom and gloom... but when it doesn't happen.  Well. Its most likely because of....

When did Ebola become something less than highly infectious?

Ebola used to be the worst of the worst.  It was the disease that you didn't want to get, because of its high infection rate and the horrible, you know, death.

This is what the CDC said about Ebola in January of 2014:

After an international investigation team arrived in May 1995 and worked with Kikwit medical community to introduce VHF isolation precautions as well as standard precautions, no further nosocomial transmission of the virus was documented, indicating that although Ebola HF is highly infectious, the use of these measures is effective in preventing the spread of disease.

Sounds prettty dangerous, right?
I mean, Ebola was the thing that they based a lot of those movies on... where people would just start dying en masse.
Now?  Well, now, anyone who is worried, is a conspiracy theorist.

"Calibration Error" on touch screens makes you vote for Democrat candidates

I know a little bit about touch screens, and how you need to calibrate them.  However... it takes a massive calibration error for this to happen:

“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

The people who program the machines purposefully put the two a mile or so apart, so that calibration errors of the touch screen won't do this.  So in order for this to happen, you'd either need the most incompetent person in the world doing the calibrating...
...or you'd need a completely crooked person.

Since this is Illinois, I'm going for the second category.

Where did all of that NIH funding go?

I love it when a politician makes a dumb claim, and then someone researches the crap out of it to prove them wrong.

For instance...

The absurd claim that only Republicans are to blame for cuts to Ebola research

What did Fact Check say about it?

 For NIH (see page 11), since 2006, there has been relatively little change in the size of the budget, going from about $28.5 billion in 2006 to $30.14 billion in 2014. That’s a slight increase, but in real terms that’s a cut given the impact of inflation. 

So where did NIH funding go?

For instance, the agency has spent $2,873,440 trying to figure out why lesbians are obese, and $466,642 on why fat girls have a tough time getting dates. Another $2,075,611 was spent encouraging old people to join choirs.

Neat.
Congratulations to the Washington Free Beacon, and Elizabeth Harrington in particular, for good research!

Anti gun state senator arrested. Guess what cops find on her?

Suppose you were Missouri State Senator Jamilah Nasheed; and you were well known for your anti-gun position. Wouldn't it be embarrassing if you were arrested while protesting in Ferguson, and it was exposed that you had a gun a 9mm handgun on you at the time?

That moment when you forget that Greg Abbott's wife is...

Wendy Davis' campaign, in some form of hail mary desperation, wrote:

Here's what's at stake in this election. Vote today. #MyTexasVotes pic.twitter.com/PQ1bT0sijC
— Wendy Davis (@WendyDavisTexas) October 20, 2014

Now I know what you're thinking. Why wouldn't Greg Abbott clear up how he feels about interracial marriage? Well... maybe you could ask his wife. She's Hispanic.

Why didn't Raymond Damadian win a Nobel Prize?

Who is Raymond Damadian?  Well, if you've ever had an MRI, you can thank Raymond Damadian. He's one of the people who came up with the ideas behind it.

The chief thing that he contributed to the history of the MRI was the idea that the hydrogen in water, which is very prevalent in cancer cells, reacts differently to magnetic resonance.
(Don't understand what magnetic resonance is? Awesome.  Most people wouldn't/don't.  You can go here for a primer. Its an online version of a book sponsored by a European MRI group.)

 The realization that cancer would react differently to magnetic resonance gave life to a lot of different ideas that led to the modern MRI.
So much so, that Raymond himself created one of the first machines:

Nonetheless, Field Focusing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FONAR) was the method used when he captured headlines in 1977, publishing the first image of a chest cavity of a live man. Initially, he had volunteered his own body for the job—without success. His associates told him he was too fat, recalls Dr Damadian. Indeed, “Indomitable”, which is what he called his machine, preferred Dr Minkoff's skinny torso. On July 3rd 1977, after four hours and 45 minutes of collecting data from 106 points, a picture was created.

So with that in mind, you'd think that Raymond would get a good portion of the credit by the Nobel committee.
You'd be wrong.

No I'm not religious.  I'm not even close to religious. But Raymond is... and he's a creationist. Which might explain why the Nobel committee snubbed him.  Even though his contribution to MRI was so important that GE had to pay him $130 million for patent infringements, along with a host of other companies paying him undisclosed sums.

The Nobel committee should be ashamed.

More voter fraud that is definitely not happening...

From the Arizona Daily Independent:

LaFaro recounts that between 12:54 p.m. and 1:04 p.m., he heard a loud thud and turned to see what was going on. “A person wearing a Citizens for a Better Arizona (CBA) t-shirt dropped a large box of hundreds of early ballots on the table and started stuffing the ballot box as I watched in amazement.”

Go read the entire article.  Its kinda amazing.  Or just watch this video, provided by the Daily Independent:

Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin doesn't know that Africa is a nation

Oh.  Wait.  Did I say Sarah Palin?


I meant the guy who won the vice presidency.

That time when 1/3rd of the public said that Obama should be impeached

Keep in mind, only 24% of the people polled were Republicans...

Based on what you have read or heard, do you believe that President Obama should be impeached and removed from office, or don't you feel that way?
Should be impeached-----33%
Don't feel that way--------65%
No opinion-----------------1%

Some of the takeaways...
Age is almost a non factor in this poll.  The difference in age demographics is around 5%
Those who attended college don't want him impeached by a 11% margin.
Among "independents", 35% want to see him impeached.
Only 13% of liberals want impeachment.
Urban, 25%.  Rural, 43%.
41% white, 17% non-white.

Now what's really annoying is when CNN asks about impeachment later in the story.
This seems to be a "push poll": a poll designed to give an opinion about the reasons for impeachment:

Question 41- In general, do you think Congress should attempt to impeach a President in order to express dissatisfaction with his policies or the way the president is handling his job, or do you think Congress should attempt impeachment only if there is evidence that the president has committed a very serious crime such as treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors?

No one is trying to impeach the president for his policies.  They are, however, arguing that the president is going beyond his presidential powers.

From conservative media outlets to the campaign trail to book stores, chatter about impeaching Obama and members of his administration has heated up in recent weeks. It’s fueled by conservative anger over the president’s increasing use of executive actions on issues such as immigration and air pollution regulations, the exchange of Taliban detainees for the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdhal, and the familiar issue of the Affordable Care Act.

Which means that the question within the poll is bunk.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/02/232163/time-to-impeach-obama.html#storylink=cpy