
Hat tip: Bern.
Savasana: Position of total relaxation.
Balasana: Position that brings the sensation of peace and calm.
Setu Bandha Sarvangasana: This position calms the brain and heals tired legs.
Marjayasana: Position stimulates the midrift area and the spinal column.
Halasana: Excellent for back pain and insomnia.
Dolphin: Excellent for the shoulder area, thorax, legs, and arms.
Salambhasana: Great exercise to stimulate the lumbar area, legs, and arms.
Ananda Balasana: This position is great for massaging the hip area.
Malasana: This position, for ankles and back muscles.
So, lets start drinking.........!
ACORN and the AGs: AT (Fitzgibbons)Reid told Republicans that he would prefer to pass healthcare reform under regular order but warned that he would not hesitate to use budget reconciliation if the legislation stalled in committee. The Senate Finance Committee began marking up a sprawling healthcare reform bill on Tuesday morning.
...Reid then spelled out how healthcare would pass under budget reconciliation proceedings, giving his colleagues a clear picture of what they face if they fail to reach bipartisan agreement.
“On reconciliation, under the order, there’s only 20 hours of debate,” Reid explained...
Here's a warning for you, Reid. Consider it career counseling. Or, rather, end-of-career counseling.
A full page ad in today's Wall Street Journal carries a powerful message from Free Enterprise Nation. It is a self-described non-partisan, private-sector advocacy group that lobbies for free markets. Its first task, aside from fundraising, is educating private sector employees about the outrageous excesses of government workers. Salaries, benefits, overall expenditures -- any metric you could name -- are on suicidal trajectories.
Now you can see why President Obama is hell-bent on nationalizing one-sixth of the economy with his thinly disguised health care "overhaul".
Sarah Palin won in a landslide, collecting more votes than all other candidates combined.
Rule #5, Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky:5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. It also infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
Taxpayer-funded Serve.gov funnels recruits to ACORN: BigGov
National credit bureau Experian teamed up with consulting firm Oliver Wyman to analyze 24 million individual credit files. The findings were truly surprising:• The number of strategic defaults is far beyond most industry estimates -- 588,000 nationwide during 2008, more than double the total in 2007. They represented 18% of all serious delinquencies that extended for more than 60 days in last year's fourth quarter.
• Strategic defaulters often go straight from perfect payment histories to no mortgage payments at all. This is in stark contrast with most financially distressed borrowers, who try to keep paying on their mortgage even after they've fallen behind on other accounts.
• Strategic defaults are heavily concentrated in negative-equity markets where home values zoomed during the boom and have cratered since 2006. In California last year, the number of strategic defaults was 68 times higher than it was in 2005. In Florida it was 46 times higher. In most other parts of the country, defaults were about nine times higher in 2008 than in 2005.• Two-thirds of strategic defaulters have only one mortgage -- the one they're walking away from on their primary homes. Individuals who have mortgages on multiple houses also have a higher likelihood of strategic default, but researchers believe that many of these walkaways are from investment properties or second homes.
• Homeowners with large mortgage balances generally are more likely to pull the plug than those with lower balances. Similarly, people with credit ratings in the two highest categories measured by VantageScore -- a joint scoring venture created by Experian and the two other national credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion -- are far more likely to default strategically than people in lower score categories.
• People who default strategically and lose their houses appear to understand the consequences of what they're doing. Piyush Tantia, an Oliver Wyman partner and a principal researcher on the study, said strategic defaulters "are clearly sophisticated," based on the patterns of selective payments observable in their credit files. For example, they tend not to default on home equity lines of credit until after they bail out on their main mortgages, sometimes to draw down more cash on the equity line.
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Now add in the fact that some expert observers believe that an enormous block of homes -- whose mortgages have already defaulted -- are being hidden by banks to avoid the impact of write-downs on their balance sheets.![]() | ![]() |
While there is little doubt that said needs are real, it is truly ironic that WhiteHouse.gov suffers from a painfully amateurish security vulnerability.
The key weakness? The White House website includes a tracking library from cetrk.com. The JavaScript library, created by "CrazyEgg.com", is typically used to produce graphical "heat maps" that show which pages visitors are clicking.<p class="subtxt">Signed: Thursday, January 29, 2009 </p>
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Far be it from me to impugn the security practices of CrazyEgg, but the name doesn't exactly inspire confidence."By referring to javascript that’s hosted elsewhere, you’re basically at the mercy of that other organization... to not do evil with it,” says David Campbell, a security consultant and a leader of the Open Web Application Security Project (http://www.owasp.org/) (OWASP). "By... pointing to javascript from somewhere else, that vulnerability is there."
...Campbell and three other website security experts interviewed for this story say it would be trivial for anyone with control of the [remote JavaScript] file to hijack authentication cookies or other session variables used to validate users accessing [administration pages]."
On August 10th, the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and the Corporation for National and Community Service hosted a conference call with a handpicked arts group. This arts group played a key role in Obama’s arts effort during his election campaign, as declared by the organizers of the call, and many on the call played a role in the now famous Obama Hope poster.
Much of the talk on the conference call was a build up to what the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was specifically asking of this group. In the following segment, Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, clearly identifies this arts group as a pro-Obama collective and warns them of some “specific asks” that will be delivered later in the meeting.
...Later in the call, “specific asks” were delivered by Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. What were the "asks"? They were for this pro-Obama arts group to create art on several hotly debated political issues, including health care...
...Setting up a propaganda machine is a dangerous precedent. The creation of a machine to address any issues, even ones with noble intentions, can be wielded by the state to create a climate amenable to the policies of those in power. Does anyone believe that once these artists are in place and we move to the election cycle, that the art they create will be bipartisan?
...the operation may well have been illegal. Public funds are not supposed to be expended to support partisan projects. Beyond that, it is unconstitutional to grant or deny federal funds on the basis of the recipient's political actions or opinions. National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. The NEA is the single largest funder of the arts, and several participants in the August 10 conference call had recently received NEA checks. It would have been entirely reasonable for those on the phone call to conclude that future NEA funding could be influenced by their willingness to play ball with the Obama administration's political agenda. Moreover, the Hatch Act limits the ability of federal employees to engage in partisan politics. Sergant's sending of the email invitation to artists and arts groups, using his government email account, could be considered a bright line violation of the act, as could his apparent solicitation of political support from any arts group that had an application for funding pending before the NEA. Likewise, Ms. Wicks' participation in the call would appear to be illegal if she was "on duty" and if the call was deemed political in nature.
For most people in this country, the resignation was the first they had heard of Van Jones. For this sin of journalistic omission, there's institutional media blame. Bias is too tame a word for the utter shamelessness on display: Only Republican scandals - real and imagined - matter...
...the American mainstream media - ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al - must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down...
...Much of America has started to realize that not only was Mr. Obama not vetted before he became president, he and his fellow unvetted cohorts continue to be given a pass...
...launching [the] compelling and stylized [ACORN] videos, we needed to offer the full transcripts and audio to the public in the name of transparency, and to offer Fox News the full footage of each video before each was released. We had to devise a plan that would force the media to see the evidence before they had enough time to destroy these two idealistic 20-something truth seekers. Mr. O'Keefe agreed to post the full audio and full transcript of his video experiences at BigGovernment.com... Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.
...Jonathan Klein, CNN's president, is emerging as symbol of the mainstream media's last depressing days.
There is something desperately wrong with the mainstream media. And that's why we did the rollout the way that we did, because we wanted to not just expose ACORN for being corrupt, we wanted to expose that the mainstream media would treat this exactly like they treated the Van Jones story. And that's ignored until the consequences got too great for them to ignore.
If you follow all the links above and track the story as it has evolved, you will see that there was plenty of "there" there and there has been plenty of time for the national media to pick up on it. Yet most in the mainstream media ignored it.
Let's walk through the thought process of a typical Times reader exposed to the second or third major story days or weeks after other outlets broke it.
ACORN's Seeds of Destruction: Post
My question is not whether crimes were committed within the Executive Branch, it's 'how many'....filmmaker James O'Keefe and actress Hannah Giles deserve a Pulitzer Prize for their expose of deep corruption and unspeakable immorality at the ACORN housing division. But more important, I won't rest until they receive a grant to continue their partisan artistry from the National Endowment for the Arts.
That's this week's mission.
Contraception advice is crucial to poor countries' battle with climate change, and policy makers are failing their people if they continue to shy away from the issue, a leading family planning expert said on Friday.
Leo Bryant, a lead researcher on a World Health Organisation study on population growth and climate change, said the stigma attached to birth control in both developing and developed countries was hindering vital progress."We are certainly not advocating that governments should start telling people how many children they can have," said Bryant, an advocacy manager at the family planning group Marie Stopes International, who wrote a commentary in the Lancet medical journal on Friday.
"The ability to choose your family size...is a fundamental human right. But lack of access to family planning means millions of people in developing countries don't have that right," he told Reuters...
If, like me, you feel on the onset of nausea every time "Strap-on Keith" appears during NBC's football broadcasts, I recommend one soothing tonic. OlbermannWatch is the definitive resource for incessant mockery of the world's most bizarre propagandist.[The] NPR commentator... has chosen to excuse the the ACORN personnel who are willing to help an assumed pimp and prostitute to set up a brothel, import under-age Central American children to become sex slaves, avoid taxes and scam the banks. [James] attributes this to the culture of the black underclass.It's also important to keep in mind that ACORN's workers are coming from the same low-income neighborhoods the organization serves, with all that entails -- poor schools, high crime and the sorts of social problems that have been documented for decades.
So the flaws conservatives are pointing out about ACORN are not so much problems associated with that organization per se but more about the problems of being poor and minority in urban America.
NPR has been accused of racism by liberals (see comments on the NPR website) and conservatives alike who deny that this is what black culture is all about. Yet look at the videos. The ACORN personnel don’t bat an eye...