July 9, 2006
Scorpions, worms and ants on the menu at club
Thu Jul 6, 2006 -NEW YORK (Reuters) - A discerning guest at a Manhattan cocktail party removed a scorpion from its bed of cheese on an endive leaf and popped it in his mouth, determined to savour the taste unadulterated.
"Nutty, sweet," was the verdict of Gourmet magazine food editor Ian Knauer at the recent soiree.
"That's an antenna," he added, pointing to a morsel of cricket left poking through lips of his companion at the Explorers Club in New York, which likes to entertain its well-traveled members with exotic culinary adventures.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-07-06T113345Z_01_N28409647_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-SCORPIONS.xml&src=rss&rpc=22
Streisand Fans Unhappy With Tour Tix
Fans are turning their backs on Barbara Streisand's new tour because of outrageous ticket prices, according to reports.
The diva is struggling to sell out concerts where tickets cost up to $800 each and promoters are concerned, claims PageSix.com.
Fans are also annoyed the tour comes six years after her official 'farewell tour' and frustrated by Streisand's reluctance to commit to promised charity donations, which means ticket-buyers can't write off the cost as a tax deduction.
...the 64-year-old is facing lawsuits from disgruntled fans who bought tickets to her 2000 tour believing it to be her last.
http://www.fox23news.com/entertainment/story.aspx?content_id=5706AAB0-C098-4CF1-88C0-F9B5D31E4E87
They want their cake and eat it too...
Expatriate Mexicans worry about election
Jul 7, LOS ANGELES - Many expatriate Mexicans who supported Felipe Calderon weren't celebrating after the conservative presidential candidate was declared winner...
http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/mexico
Hunting Norwegian Whalers Shock Tourists
Jul 05 OSLO, Norway- Hunters shocked a boatload of tourists on a whale watch off Norway's Arctic during the weekend, harpooning a whale in front of them.
About 80 tourists were aboard the trawler Reine, which was headed for areas off the Arctic Lofoten Islands known for their abundance of whales, when the incident happened on Saturday, the boat's skipper Geir Maan said by telephone on Wednesday.
"We were on our way out to the whale watching area when we passed a whaling boat," Maan, the boat's skipper, told The Associated Press. Usually, whaling and tour boats maintain a distance between them.
...The whaling boat fired, and Maan said he later learned through the hunters that it had made a kill in front of the tourists...
"This was definitely not what we came to see," Leontien Dieleman, of the Netherlands, was quoted as saying in Wednesday's Andoeyposten newspaper. "We wanted to see live whales."
"It was a little unlucky," Maan said of the incident, adding that the whalers usually wait until tour boats have passed to make a kill.
On the way back, the tourists also saw another whaling boat hauling a dead minke aboard, he said...
[Quit wailing and blubbering!! This is something they'll remember for a long time, much longer than watching a whale expel air or what ever from it's blow hole... This kind of reminded me of the little seal pup rescued from the Exxon Valdez spill. After six weeks and over $50,000, the animal was released back into its natural environment with all due fanfare of speechifying and posturing; only to have it swim off shore and get hit broadside by the gaping maw of a killer whale.]
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/07/05/D8IM37CG0.html
Private sector adds 368,000 jobs in June: survey
Wed Jul 5, NEW YORK - U.S. private sector employers created an estimated 368,000 jobs in June, compared with 122,000 jobs in the previous month, a report by a private employment service said on Wednesday.
The monthly ADP National Employment Report is based on payroll data and measures the change in total private sector nonfarm employment each month.
The report is released each month, two days before the government's own job survey of a net gain in nonfarm jobs in the U.S. private and public sectors.
"These findings indicate a strong acceleration of employment in June," said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC, said in a statement. Macroeconomic Advisers developed the ADP report together with ADP Employer Services.
He separately told Reuters that private sector jobs growth in June was "broad-based," averaging around 218,000 over the last six months. "I'm pretty confident that jobs growth on Friday would be healthy and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows an acceleration."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060705/us_nm/economy_employment_adp_dc;_ylt=AktuxtmQCrKj_hKIdCGY0c2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-
Reporting on the economy is worse than the economy
Forty-seven percent of Americans, according to a recent poll, believe the economy is doing "badly." Or, as a woman I encountered at a party recently put it, "Bush put the economy in the toilet." Really?
The feds just revised upward -- again -- the economic performance of the last quarter. From January through March 2006, the economy grew at a rate of 5.6 percent -- higher than any in the last two-and-a-half years. Despite recent inflation scares, inflation remains low, at a 2.1 percent core rate. Unemployment, at 4.6 percent, represents a lower rate than the average during the '60s, '70s, '80s and the '90s. Since August 2003, the economy has created more than 5.3 million jobs.
States report record tax receipts. Sixteen states report revenue growth of more than 10 percent, with the strongest -- Georgia -- showing a 20.5 percent increase. Increased tax revenues occur during economic prosperity, with increasing incomes and therefore larger personal and corporate tax payments, as well as increased revenues from sales tax.
see rest of article at: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2006/07/06/reporting_on_the_economy_is_worse_than_the_economy
This proves John F Kennedy was correct, to raise revenue cut taxes... and relative to the NYT it illustrates even a broken clock is correct twice a day, though they still find a way to cast this news in a negative light...
Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit
NYT- WASHINGTON, July 8 — An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.
On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts...
...Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year.
The main reason is a big spike in corporate tax receipts, which have nearly tripled since 2003, as well as what appears to be a big increase in individual taxes on stock market profits and executive bonuses.
On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that corporate tax receipts for the nine months ending in June hit $250 billion — nearly 26 percent higher than the same time last year — and that overall revenues were $206 billion higher than at this point in 2005.
Congressional analysts say the surprise windfall could shrink the deficit this year to $300 billion, from ...an all-time high of $412 billion in 2004...
...Nevertheless, the short-term change has been striking. At the beginning of the year, the Congressional Budget Office projected that this year's deficit would be $371 billion and the White House Office of Management and Budget put the figure at $423 billion.
Corporate tax payments are expected to exceed $300 billion, up from $131 billion three years ago. The other big increase is an extraordinary jump in individual taxes that were not withheld from paychecks, usually a reflection of taxes on investment income and executive bonuses.
The jump in receipts is providing Mr. Bush and Republicans in Congress with a new opportunity to assert that tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are working and that Congress should make them permanent.
Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political fund-raising group, said: "The supply-siders were absolutely right. All the major sources of revenue have grown, especially in areas where we said they would."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/washington/09econ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Severe labor shortages in Calgary and Edmonton
Alberta, Canada’s oil-rich economic powerhouse, is in the midst of a boom that has created severe labor shortages. The oil and gas industry, including the vast tar sands with more reserves than Saudi Arabia, is hiring at a prodigious rate.
Many businesses, such as restaurants, cannot compete with the wages in the resource industry, and are threatened with closing down in Calgary. City hall also has problems staying staffed. Word from a friend recently back from Edmonton tells me that business there all complain of losing staff and being unable to replace them.
Alberta is on the rise, in Canada and beyond. Its wealth funds other provinces and its growth fires the Canadian economy.
see rest of article at:http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=5511
Gene study shows sex differences go deep Jul 7, WASHINGTON - Thousands of genes behave differently in the same organs of males and females, researchers reported on Friday, a finding that may help explain why men and women have different responses to drugs and diseases...
"This research holds important implications for understanding disorders such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, and identifies targets for the development of gender-specific therapies," said Jake Lusis, a professor of human genetics who worked on the study.
Writing in the August issue of Genome Research, the researchers said that even in the same organ, scores of genes varied in expression levels between the sexes.
The smallest differences were in brain tissue, they found.
"We saw striking and measurable differences in more than half of the genes' expression patterns between males and females," said Dr. Thomas Drake, a professor of pathology. "We didn't expect that. No one has previously demonstrated this genetic gender gap at such high levels."http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060707/sc_nm/science_sex_dc
FBI Disrupts NYC Tunnel Terror Plot
Friday, July 7, 2006 NEW YORK -- Authorities have disrupted foreign terrorists plotting to attack the transportation tunnels running beneath the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, the FBI announced Friday.
"For most of the year, we have been focusing on a group of al-Qaida followers who have targeted the Hudson River tubes," FBI Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon said Friday. "We believe we intercepted this group early in their plotting and, in fact, the plan has largely been disrupted."
...The New York Daily News had reported Friday that the plotters wanted to blow up the tunnel, the southernmost link between Manhattan and New Jersey, in the hopes of flooding New York's financial district.http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/7/7/91721.shtml?s=lh
Al Gore's Green Money Machine
July 7th, 2006- As Al Gore’s global warming alarm tour winds down for the summer, let’s pull back the curtain and see the real wizard. After you get past all the scare mongering, what is left is a giant scheme to tax the air we breathe. No wonder the tax and spend liberals are so enthralled with big Al. And everyone else thought he was tilting at windmills....
...Al Gore’s global warming scare is an elaborate scheme to impose more debilitating regulations and squeeze more taxes out of the people – especially Americans. The promoters want to ride roughshod over state and federal authority and impose a global authority accountable to no one...
complete article at http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5650
The shame of the Times
http://townhall.com/columnists/BruceBartlett/2006/07/04/the_shame_of_the_times
Captured docs expose Saddam and Blix
http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=5530
David Bennett<><
http://freewill-predestination.com
http://www.knology.net/~lonesomedove
Thu Jul 6, 2006 -NEW YORK (Reuters) - A discerning guest at a Manhattan cocktail party removed a scorpion from its bed of cheese on an endive leaf and popped it in his mouth, determined to savour the taste unadulterated.
"Nutty, sweet," was the verdict of Gourmet magazine food editor Ian Knauer at the recent soiree.
"That's an antenna," he added, pointing to a morsel of cricket left poking through lips of his companion at the Explorers Club in New York, which likes to entertain its well-traveled members with exotic culinary adventures.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-07-06T113345Z_01_N28409647_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-SCORPIONS.xml&src=rss&rpc=22
Streisand Fans Unhappy With Tour Tix
Fans are turning their backs on Barbara Streisand's new tour because of outrageous ticket prices, according to reports.
The diva is struggling to sell out concerts where tickets cost up to $800 each and promoters are concerned, claims PageSix.com.
Fans are also annoyed the tour comes six years after her official 'farewell tour' and frustrated by Streisand's reluctance to commit to promised charity donations, which means ticket-buyers can't write off the cost as a tax deduction.
...the 64-year-old is facing lawsuits from disgruntled fans who bought tickets to her 2000 tour believing it to be her last.
http://www.fox23news.com/entertainment/story.aspx?content_id=5706AAB0-C098-4CF1-88C0-F9B5D31E4E87
They want their cake and eat it too...
Expatriate Mexicans worry about election
Jul 7, LOS ANGELES - Many expatriate Mexicans who supported Felipe Calderon weren't celebrating after the conservative presidential candidate was declared winner...
http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/mexico
Hunting Norwegian Whalers Shock Tourists
Jul 05 OSLO, Norway- Hunters shocked a boatload of tourists on a whale watch off Norway's Arctic during the weekend, harpooning a whale in front of them.
About 80 tourists were aboard the trawler Reine, which was headed for areas off the Arctic Lofoten Islands known for their abundance of whales, when the incident happened on Saturday, the boat's skipper Geir Maan said by telephone on Wednesday.
"We were on our way out to the whale watching area when we passed a whaling boat," Maan, the boat's skipper, told The Associated Press. Usually, whaling and tour boats maintain a distance between them.
...The whaling boat fired, and Maan said he later learned through the hunters that it had made a kill in front of the tourists...
"This was definitely not what we came to see," Leontien Dieleman, of the Netherlands, was quoted as saying in Wednesday's Andoeyposten newspaper. "We wanted to see live whales."
"It was a little unlucky," Maan said of the incident, adding that the whalers usually wait until tour boats have passed to make a kill.
On the way back, the tourists also saw another whaling boat hauling a dead minke aboard, he said...
[Quit wailing and blubbering!! This is something they'll remember for a long time, much longer than watching a whale expel air or what ever from it's blow hole... This kind of reminded me of the little seal pup rescued from the Exxon Valdez spill. After six weeks and over $50,000, the animal was released back into its natural environment with all due fanfare of speechifying and posturing; only to have it swim off shore and get hit broadside by the gaping maw of a killer whale.]
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/07/05/D8IM37CG0.html
Private sector adds 368,000 jobs in June: survey
Wed Jul 5, NEW YORK - U.S. private sector employers created an estimated 368,000 jobs in June, compared with 122,000 jobs in the previous month, a report by a private employment service said on Wednesday.
The monthly ADP National Employment Report is based on payroll data and measures the change in total private sector nonfarm employment each month.
The report is released each month, two days before the government's own job survey of a net gain in nonfarm jobs in the U.S. private and public sectors.
"These findings indicate a strong acceleration of employment in June," said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC, said in a statement. Macroeconomic Advisers developed the ADP report together with ADP Employer Services.
He separately told Reuters that private sector jobs growth in June was "broad-based," averaging around 218,000 over the last six months. "I'm pretty confident that jobs growth on Friday would be healthy and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows an acceleration."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060705/us_nm/economy_employment_adp_dc;_ylt=AktuxtmQCrKj_hKIdCGY0c2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-
Reporting on the economy is worse than the economy
Forty-seven percent of Americans, according to a recent poll, believe the economy is doing "badly." Or, as a woman I encountered at a party recently put it, "Bush put the economy in the toilet." Really?
The feds just revised upward -- again -- the economic performance of the last quarter. From January through March 2006, the economy grew at a rate of 5.6 percent -- higher than any in the last two-and-a-half years. Despite recent inflation scares, inflation remains low, at a 2.1 percent core rate. Unemployment, at 4.6 percent, represents a lower rate than the average during the '60s, '70s, '80s and the '90s. Since August 2003, the economy has created more than 5.3 million jobs.
States report record tax receipts. Sixteen states report revenue growth of more than 10 percent, with the strongest -- Georgia -- showing a 20.5 percent increase. Increased tax revenues occur during economic prosperity, with increasing incomes and therefore larger personal and corporate tax payments, as well as increased revenues from sales tax.
see rest of article at: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2006/07/06/reporting_on_the_economy_is_worse_than_the_economy
This proves John F Kennedy was correct, to raise revenue cut taxes... and relative to the NYT it illustrates even a broken clock is correct twice a day, though they still find a way to cast this news in a negative light...
Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit
NYT- WASHINGTON, July 8 — An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.
On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts...
...Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year.
The main reason is a big spike in corporate tax receipts, which have nearly tripled since 2003, as well as what appears to be a big increase in individual taxes on stock market profits and executive bonuses.
On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that corporate tax receipts for the nine months ending in June hit $250 billion — nearly 26 percent higher than the same time last year — and that overall revenues were $206 billion higher than at this point in 2005.
Congressional analysts say the surprise windfall could shrink the deficit this year to $300 billion, from ...an all-time high of $412 billion in 2004...
...Nevertheless, the short-term change has been striking. At the beginning of the year, the Congressional Budget Office projected that this year's deficit would be $371 billion and the White House Office of Management and Budget put the figure at $423 billion.
Corporate tax payments are expected to exceed $300 billion, up from $131 billion three years ago. The other big increase is an extraordinary jump in individual taxes that were not withheld from paychecks, usually a reflection of taxes on investment income and executive bonuses.
The jump in receipts is providing Mr. Bush and Republicans in Congress with a new opportunity to assert that tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are working and that Congress should make them permanent.
Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political fund-raising group, said: "The supply-siders were absolutely right. All the major sources of revenue have grown, especially in areas where we said they would."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/washington/09econ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Severe labor shortages in Calgary and Edmonton
Alberta, Canada’s oil-rich economic powerhouse, is in the midst of a boom that has created severe labor shortages. The oil and gas industry, including the vast tar sands with more reserves than Saudi Arabia, is hiring at a prodigious rate.
Many businesses, such as restaurants, cannot compete with the wages in the resource industry, and are threatened with closing down in Calgary. City hall also has problems staying staffed. Word from a friend recently back from Edmonton tells me that business there all complain of losing staff and being unable to replace them.
Alberta is on the rise, in Canada and beyond. Its wealth funds other provinces and its growth fires the Canadian economy.
see rest of article at:http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=5511
Gene study shows sex differences go deep Jul 7, WASHINGTON - Thousands of genes behave differently in the same organs of males and females, researchers reported on Friday, a finding that may help explain why men and women have different responses to drugs and diseases...
"This research holds important implications for understanding disorders such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, and identifies targets for the development of gender-specific therapies," said Jake Lusis, a professor of human genetics who worked on the study.
Writing in the August issue of Genome Research, the researchers said that even in the same organ, scores of genes varied in expression levels between the sexes.
The smallest differences were in brain tissue, they found.
"We saw striking and measurable differences in more than half of the genes' expression patterns between males and females," said Dr. Thomas Drake, a professor of pathology. "We didn't expect that. No one has previously demonstrated this genetic gender gap at such high levels."http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060707/sc_nm/science_sex_dc
FBI Disrupts NYC Tunnel Terror Plot
Friday, July 7, 2006 NEW YORK -- Authorities have disrupted foreign terrorists plotting to attack the transportation tunnels running beneath the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, the FBI announced Friday.
"For most of the year, we have been focusing on a group of al-Qaida followers who have targeted the Hudson River tubes," FBI Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon said Friday. "We believe we intercepted this group early in their plotting and, in fact, the plan has largely been disrupted."
...The New York Daily News had reported Friday that the plotters wanted to blow up the tunnel, the southernmost link between Manhattan and New Jersey, in the hopes of flooding New York's financial district.http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/7/7/91721.shtml?s=lh
Al Gore's Green Money Machine
July 7th, 2006- As Al Gore’s global warming alarm tour winds down for the summer, let’s pull back the curtain and see the real wizard. After you get past all the scare mongering, what is left is a giant scheme to tax the air we breathe. No wonder the tax and spend liberals are so enthralled with big Al. And everyone else thought he was tilting at windmills....
...Al Gore’s global warming scare is an elaborate scheme to impose more debilitating regulations and squeeze more taxes out of the people – especially Americans. The promoters want to ride roughshod over state and federal authority and impose a global authority accountable to no one...
complete article at http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5650
The shame of the Times
http://townhall.com/columnists/BruceBartlett/2006/07/04/the_shame_of_the_times
Captured docs expose Saddam and Blix
http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=5530
David Bennett<><
http://freewill-predestination.com
http://www.knology.net/~lonesomedove
posted by David Bennett | 6:17 PM
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