For comparison, here is what it looked like before.

I've been next to a female Right whale... *with her baby* off the coast of Massachusetts. She brought the baby nearby to apparently show the baby off. It was amazing how friendly these creatures were. They'd turn their heads to get a good close look... and even seemed to playfully blow water. They were literally 2 feet from me. An amazing experience for sure. These whales aren't just 'stupid fish' they are remarkably intelligent creatures.

>> ^Duckman33:

I hope they pass this.


Agreed. Either them or Massachusetts. Someone's got to get the ball rolling.

Rank↓ State↓ 2009↓ 2008↓ 2007↓ 2004-2006↓
1 Maryland $79,272 $78,454 $78,725 $77,985
2 New Jersey $68,342 $70,378 $67,035 $64,169
3 Connecticut $67,034 $68,595 $65,967 $59,972
4 Alaska $66,953 $68,460 $64,333 $57,639
5 Hawaii $64,098 $67,214 $63,746 $60,681
6 Massachusetts $64,081 $65,401 $62,365 $56,236
7 New Hampshire $60,567 $63,731 $62,369 $60,489
8 Virginia $59,330 $61,233 $59,562 $55,108
District of Columbia $59,290 $57,936 $54,317 $47,221 (2005)[3]PDF
9 California $58,931 $61,021 $59,948 $53,770
10 Delaware $56,860 $57,989 $54,610 $52,214
11 Washington $56,548 $58,078 $55,591 $53,439
12 Minnesota $55,616 $57,288 $55,082 $57,363
13 Colorado $55,430 $56,993 $55,212 $54,039
14 Utah $55,117 $56,633 $55,109 $55,179
15 New York $54,659 $56,033 $53,514 $48,201
16 Rhode Island $54,119 $55,701 $53,568 $52,003
17 Illinois $53,966 $56,235 $54,124 $49,280
18 Nevada $53,341 $56,361 $55,062 $50,819
19 Wyoming $52,664 $53,207 $51,731 $47,227
20 Vermont $51,618 $52,104 $49,907 $51,622
United States $50,221 $52,029 $50,740 $46,242 (2005) [4]PDF
21 Wisconsin $49,993 $52,094 $50,578 $48,874
22 Pennsylvania $49,520 $50,713 $48,576 $47,791
23 Arizona $48,745 $50,958 $49,889 $46,729
24 Oregon $48,457 $50,169 $48,730 $45,485
25 Texas $48,259 $50,043 $47,548 $43,425
26 Iowa $48,044 $48,980 $47,292 $47,489
27 North Dakota $47,827 $45,685 $43,753 $43,753
28 Kansas $47,817 $50,177 $47,451 $44,264
29 Georgia $47,590 $50,861 $49,136 $46,841
30 Nebraska $47,357 $49,693 $47,085 $48,126
31 Maine $45,734 $46,581 $45,888 $45,040
32 Indiana $45,424 $47,966 $47,448 $44,806
33 Ohio $45,395 $47,988 $46,597 $45,837
34 Michigan $45,255 $48,591 $47,950 $47,064
35 Missouri $45,229 $46,867 $45,114 $44,651
36 South Dakota $45,043 $46,032 $43,424 $44,624
37 Idaho $44,926 $47,576 $46,253 $46,395
38 Florida $44,736 $47,778 $47,804 $44,448
39 North Carolina $43,674 $46,549 $44,670 $42,061
40 New Mexico $43,028 $43,508 $41,452 $40,827
41 Louisiana $42,492 $43,733 $40,926 $37,943
42 South Carolina $42,442 $44,625 $43,329 $40,822
43 Montana $42,322 $43,654 $43,531 $38,629
44 Tennessee $41,725 $43,614 $42,367 $40,676
45 Oklahoma $41,664 $42,822 $41,567 $40,001
46 Alabama $40,489 $42,666 $40,554 $38,473
47 Kentucky $40,072 $41,538 $40,267 $38,466
48 Arkansas $37,823 $38,815 $38,134 $37,420
49 West Virginia $37,435 $37,989 $37,060 $37,227
50 Mississippi $36,646 $37,790 $36,338 $35,261
Puerto Rico $17,500 $17,000

Those are some real classy bunch of people. I've heard rumors saying Boston and parts of Massachusetts were pretty ghetto. I believe it now.

Want to know what it even worse? Laws like this are still on the books, and enforced.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law:

"In Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, car dealerships continue to operate under blue-law prohibitions in which an automobile may not be purchased or traded on a Sunday. Maryland permits Sunday automobile sales only in the counties of Prince George's, Montgomery, and Howard; similarly, Michigan restricts Sunday sales to only those counties with a population of less than 130,000. Texas and Utah prohibit car dealerships from operating over consecutive weekend days.

Many states still prohibit selling alcohol on Sunday, or at least before noon on Sunday, under the rationale that people should be in church on Sunday morning, or at least not drinking.

Blue laws may also prohibit retail activity on days other than Sunday. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example, blue laws dating to the Puritans of the 17th century still prohibit most retail stores, including grocery stores, from opening on Thanksgiving and Christmas."

I'm so glad these were ruled to be unconstitutional here in Canada in 1985.
>> ^kceaton1:

So sad that this is more or less true. It leaves me speechless.

Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. The solar powered heat ray he is credited with inventing is thought by some to be a myth - but it may well have functioned based on the results of several experiments over the years.

Archimedes' heat ray was supposedly used in the Siege of Syracuse to focus sunlight onto approaching Roman ships, causing them to catch fire. Some have theorised that highly polished shields may have been used to focus the sunlight, much in the same way modern solar thermal farms use parabolic collectors.

Parabolic mirrors were described and studied by one of Archimedes' contemporaries, mathematician Diocles in his work "On Burning Mirrors", so their existence and possible application was known in the same time period as the Siege of Syracuse.

Over the ensuing centuries, various parties have attempted to prove or disprove the existence of Archimedes' heat ray using materials Archimedes would have had available to him at the time - and also with more modern materials.

A test in the 1970's by Greek scientist Ioannis Sakkas using 70 mirrors measuring 1.5 metres by 1 metre set fire to a mock wooden ship at a distance of around 50 metres. In 2005, an experiment by students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology using 127 small mirror tiles at a distance of 30 metres from a wooden target resulted in a fire after 10 minutes of perfect conditions. A repeat of this experiment for the Myth Busters television series found Archimedes' solar powered "death ray" was unlikely to have performed as reported and that other weaponry available at the time with the ability to set fire to ships, such as catapults, would have been far more effective and likely used.

More recently, the authors of Green Power Science have demonstrated the solar powered death ray was indeed possible. Using just 27 ordinary flat mirrors of various sizes, they were also able to set fire to a model wooden ship. Under ideal conditions, the mast of the model caught fire in under a minute. They believe Archimedes could have had access to many parabolic mirrors made of highly polished metal that would have provided a more focused reflection than flat glass mirrors; and also the necessary manpower for a substantial manual "solar tracking" system to keep sunlight focused on the ships for long enough to set them ablaze.

http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=1006

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO BE A DEMOCRAT, BUT IT HELPS
October 27, 2010

Ann Coulter


With the media sneering about the Tea Party candidates being a bunch of nuts, how about we take a look at some of the Democrats running this year?

We've got Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, who personally presided over the housing crash after getting that gay prostitution business behind him. Of course, Frank's actions are nothing compared to Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul's alleged participation in a college prank. Now, THERE'S a scandal!

California Sen. Barbara Boxer refuses to say whether a newborn baby is a human life. When Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., asked her on the Senate floor a few years ago whether she believed a baby born alive has a constitutionally protected right to live, Boxer was stuck for an answer. Her nonresponsive replies included these:

"I support the Roe v. Wade decision. ...

"I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born -- and the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights. ...

"Define 'separation' ...

"You mean the baby has been birthed and is now in its mother's arms? ...

"The baby is born when the baby is born. That is the answer to the question. ...

"I am not answering these questions! I am not answering these questions!"

(Also, I think she said: "Please call me 'senator.'")

That's not Patty Murray-stupid, but it's still pretty stupid. How many late-term abortions are you planning to get, Californians, that it's worth being represented by such a cretinous woman?

Even if you are under the misimpression that Boxer's Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina, is somehow going to outlaw abortion in California, Carly will cut your taxes so much that you'd be able to fly to Sweden for all your abortions and still come out ahead!

Liberals are indignant that Sarah Palin writes speech notes to herself on her hand. This week, Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, was slipped a debating point by her makeup artist, texted by a campaign aide in violation of the rules during a debate with her Republican opponent, Rick Scott.

Oh, those thick Tea Party candidates!

Last weekend, Illinois governor Pat Quinn -- Rod Blagojevich's running mate -- stood silently as his supporter, state Sen. Rickey Hendon, blasted Quinn's Republican opponent, Bill Brady, as "idiotic, racist, sexist, homophobic."

Hendon has repeatedly made headlines over the past few years for his inappropriate behavior toward female colleagues. Once -- during a Senate debate -- he asked Sen. Cheryl Axley if her hair was naturally blond and then publicly propositioned her.

Another time, Hendon tackled Rep. Robin L. Kelly, knocking her to the ground after a House-Senate softball game she had come to watch in office attire.

Of the impeccable Brady, Hendon wailed: "If you think that women have no rights whatsoever, except to have his children, vote for Bill Brady. If you think gay and lesbian people need to be locked up and shot in the head, vote for Bill Brady."

Even the Chicago press was shocked by this, calling on Quinn to apologize. Quinn has "renounced" Hendon's remarks, but refused to apologize.

But watch out for the Tea Party candidates! There are some real loose cannons in that bunch.

Also last week, Rep. Ron Klein, Democrat of Florida, hysterically claimed he had been "threatened" by one of the Vietnam Veteran bikers supporting his Republican opponent, Allen West.

The man who had allegedly "threatened" Klein is 60 years old and goes by the terrifying name of ... "Miami Mike." Mike told the Miami Herald that he had simply e-mailed Klein, saying that he deserved to be voted out of office and, in addition, he needed "a good ass-kicking, which I'd be more than happy to do even though I'm a lot older than you."

As Miami Mike said: "A threat? Give me a break. He cannot be scared of what I wrote. If he is, he is just a real baby."

Apparently so. Klein turned Mike's e-mail over to the Capitol police, where they promptly burst out laughing and then ordered framed copies of the e-mail.

Speaking of little girls in pink party dresses, Keith Olbermann has repeatedly claimed that Allen West "disgraced his uniform." Weirdly, he never gives details of how he thinks West did that. (Maybe Olbermann could check on war-zone protocol with fake-Vietnam War veteran Dick Blumenthal, who's running for the Senate from Connecticut by lying about having served in Vietnam.)

As a colonel in Iraq, West was interrogating an Iraqi terrorist who knew about a planned ambush. Unable to get him to talk, West shot a gun near the terrorist's head, whereupon the frightened but unharmed detainee spilled the beans.

Because of that, West's men were able to capture a potential attacker and identify future ambush sites. There were no further attacks on West's men.

As West later told The New York Times, "There are rules and regulations, and there's protecting your soldiers." He said, "I just felt I'd never have to write a letter of condolence home to a 'rule and regulation.'"

When the Army considered court-martialing West, thousands of letters poured in defending West and thanking him for what he had done. Ninety-five members of Congress signed a letter to the secretary of the Army in support of West. No court-martial was ever convened.

Liberals won't say that John Phillip Walker Lindh disgraced his country. Washington Sen. Patty Murray thinks Osama bin Laden is a swell guy for building "day care centers" in Afghanistan. But they say a hero like Allen West "disgraced his uniform" by saving the lives of American soldiers.

Yeah, the Tea Party candidates are a real embarrassment.

@lampishthing she could always run for Senate in a state other than Massachusetts. Maybe take on Liebermann in Connecticut in 2012?

Many, if not most, states have exceptions to the concept of "statutory rape" when the age of the people involved are close. For Massachusetts, it appears that if the victim is between 12 and 16, the age difference must be greater than 10 years for it to qualify as statutory.

I don't see how they can make this charge stick...it's far more likely that this is an example of loading up the charges in an attempt to encourage a plea bargain.

I don't know about this one. The lady in the video seems thrilled to see the draconian punishment these young bullies will face when they're forced to register as sex offenders. I want to know more about the physical abuse and what exactly that entailed.

I'm glad they're not convicting them for murder. Violation of civil rights? Sure, okay, I suppose. Statutory rape charges? That's a bit much. High school kids who are 17 and 18 have 15 year old girlfriends; it's not that unlikely. And, yes, they do have sex.

There's a second video here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/30/massachusetts.bullying.suicide/index.html?hpt=T1

I think it's political posturing on behalf of the White House. It mirrors their original strategy of allowing the senators and congress to at least publicly appear to design the policy so the president can strike a moderate and neutral position. Since the public option ended up becoming so divisive, by scrapping it they're building a convincing narrative that they were willing to compromise whereas the Republicans simply weren't interested in entering the debate at all.

Will be interesting to see if they're right. The real tragedy though is that they missold it in the first place and allowed it to get to this point. What they initially proposed was an already compromised and moderate position that should have been palatable to Republicans since from my understanding it was quite similar to the one enacted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The point they lost the Senate and the ability to pass the bill in both houses easily in the state that already has mandated health insurance and to a Senator who supported that state plan should have been the talking point for weeks yet I only read it a couple of times in print.

So, something tells me, no matter how much they compromise here, the narrative will still be that they've created a fascist socialist (?) utopia.

Take it from a Massachusett's resident. This guy will say anything, and do anything to get elected to office. He will be your best buddy one moment, and then turn on you, if someone offers him a better deal, the next. He's not a mercenary, as any form of payment will be accepted, so long as its better then the previous form of payment: money, presidental office, women, divine status, etc. That makes him just dangerous.

Shouldn't be surprising, that not only the health care industry 'bought him', but that that he was saying alot of this garbage on Fox News. Yes, a 'news' station know for reporting the 'facts' and 'evidence', without bias or opinion.

>> ^My_design:
One other question, if the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate, prior to Kennedy's death, then what kept them from getting this thing passed the first time around? I would think that it would have been better for them to pass the bill when they could and then make the changes later.

You and me both! Democrats seem to love to shoot themselves in the foot. They were bending over backwards and tying themselves into knots to make the bill appealing enough to conservatives to win Republican votes.

They also have members of their own party whose electoral strategy is to be "centrist", which often means "hold legislation hostage until Democrats water down their legislation." There also was a pretty drawn out argument between the Senate and the House about things like the public option, employer mandates, how to pay for it (liberals wanted to tax the rich, conservadems wanted to repeal the tax exemption on employer benefits), the overall level at which people would be subsidized, and even whether there would be a single, nationwide "exchange" set up, or if they would be done state-by-state. The conservadems in the Senate won every single one of those fights by holding their breath and refusing to vote for the bill until they got their way. After they lost the race in MA, there wasn't any way for the House to try to claw any of those back, except some of the tax & subsidy stuff (via the reconciliation "sidecar").

I also think losing the Senate race in Massachusetts itself was political malpractice. There was no way a Republican should have won that race, but Coakley went on vacation after the primary (literally and figuratively), and Brown went to everyone's front yard and asked for their vote. That's a recipe for success, no matter what the prevailing political environment looks like. Voters don't like to be taken for granted like that.

@bmacs27, my chief point in that comment was that the vast, overwhelming majority of congress is too indebted to big business to pass anything that won't help the existing big businesses either make scads of money short term, or give them a stable business model long term. So, of course the bill helps the bottom line of big business -- the question is, is it simply a gift, or do the American people get something out of it too? I think that this one is a win-win. I would've preferred a win-lose situation (people win, company profits lose), but as long as it seems like there's a fair mutual benefit, I don't begrudge letting the insurance companies make a little more money.

As far as ideology, it only enters into this because one party sees political gain in making it out to be an ideological issue. For proof of that, revisit what republicans proposed in the 90's, and look at what Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts. They're arguably less free market than the plan making its way through Congress now. For a real shocker, go back and look at what Nixon wanted to do.

As far as the public at large, I guess what I'm really saying is that I refuse to condone the mistaken idea that free market absolutism is some core tenet of our country's cultural value system. Even amongst conservatives and libertarians, there's certainly no reason to think that government mandated HSA's that abolish a sector of the existing economy should be more acceptable than government mandated insurance, with a new regulatory regime that will improve competition and consumer protection, unless of course people go on TV every day to say the latter is socialism and/or fascism.

I would suggest that existence and popularity of Social Security and Medicare undercuts the idea that Americans are largely conservative ideologues. If Americans really were even remotely the kind of ideologues that you suggest, those programs would already have been dismantled and dismissed as mistakes. Instead, you can't get support for repealing them, even if you call it "privatizing".

The above is my long-winded way of saying that all the talk of ideological resistance is propaganda. When you ask people about the individual provisions of the Democratic plan, everything but the individual mandate is popular, and even the individual mandate has a better net favorability than the bill that contains all of those elements.

The problem isn't that the bill is fundamentally unpalatable to the American people, it's that the American people don't know what's in the bill, and Republicans have filled that void with fear and lies (and Democrats have done little if anything to combat that).

As far as getting Republican voes, Republicans don't actually have an ideological objection to what Democrats are trying to do. They have a political imperative to object to what Democrats are trying to do, no matter what they actually try to do. Republicans aren't suggesting more dramatic, free market reforms, they're proposing minor tweaks that would disproportionately benefit insurance companies rather than people, and wouldn't address any of the shortcomings of the existing system.