Jimmy Obama's  stock - falling. Chris  the thrill Matthews' stock - falling. Palin's  stock -  rising. We shall see how she did with her endorsement of Deb Fisher in Nebraska very shortly.

People are going to miss it.  It was one of the few clubs where you could discuss Weber during a lap dance.

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

Elizabeth Warren,  Native American Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard

It looks to me that we, in the US, are living in an age of nepotism.  The whole Kennedy family is one big example. A quick scan of movie crawls reveals familiar name after familiar name, just as a look at IMDB reveals what must be a startling genetic predisposition for acting and production skills. Anyone familiar with the hiring of congressional staffers knows the Chicago method prevails with the notion of nephew extended to include donors but not excluding nephews. Sports the ultimate meritocracy is full of powerful coaches family members. Pare up the word nepotism with any other word and do a Google search. You will get surprising results. Nepotism has always been with us but the current epidemic of nepotism goes hand in hand with our present culture.

A interesting test in Nebraska.

"Tea Party Express Endorsing Jon Bruning for Senate at Press Conference Today"

http://www.teapartyexpress.org/3829/tea-party-express-endorsing-jon-bruning-for-senate-at-press-conference-today

But now there is this:

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/senate-races/226377-palin-backs-deb-fischer-in-nebraskas-gop-senate-primary

Mourdock featured the Palin endorsement.

http://richardmourdock.com/blog/2012/april/sarah-palin-endorsement

The Club for Growth endorsed Don Stenberg in Nebraska.

"In Nebraska next week, Club-backed state Treasurer Don Stenberg has slipped to third in the most recent poll (though Club backers note their campaign was mostly anti-Jon Bruning, and he could still fall to state senator Deb Fischer, who announced the backing of Sarah Palin on Wednesday)."

In Indiana the conservatives were united behind Mourdock,  in Nebraska they are splitting their endorsements. It will be interesting to see what transpires.

http://www.bigredtoday.com/article/20120509/NEWS01/705099827

There has been a lot of talk about the Social Security Trust Fund.  But let's look at some other trust funds no one has ever heard of -  the Federal Employee Retirement Fund (FERS) and the Military Retirement Fund (MRF) - each bigger than the SS Trust Fund.

Since this is a discussion about military funding let's concentrate on the Military Retirement Fund.  Like much government bookkeeping - all governments, not just the US government books - it is rife with, to put it politely,  misdirection and wishful thinking.

Note the fund is predicated on expectations of 5.75% interest income but thanks to Federal Reserve Bank policies - QE, financial repression - it, like all creditors and pension funds, is receiving close to 0%.

The unfunded liabilities of the MRF is currently $1.3 TRILLION. It could easily be as much as $2 TRILLION in ten or so years.

Even in present Washington, DC a trillion here and a trillion there still add up to real money.  These trillions of red ink appear nowhere in those graphs referenced above or discussions of military spending which is currently about $685 billion.

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-18-02/military-winning-war-over-pensions

To answer my own question...

ARIZONA:  Jon Kyle (R) retiring. 

Jeff Flake candidate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Arizona,_2012

MAINE: Olympia Snowe (R) retiring.

Scott D'Amboise candidate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Maine,_2012

MISSOURI: Claire McCaskill (D) incumbent

Sarah Steelman candidate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Missouri,_2012

NEBRASKA: Ben Nelson (D) retiring

Jon Bruning candidate (endorsed by Tea Party Express today)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Nebraska,_2012

OHIO: Sherrod Brown (D) incumbent

Josh Mandel candidate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Ohio,_2012

TEXAS: Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) retiring

Tex Cruz candidate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Texas,_2012

UTAH: Orrin Hatch (R) incumbent

Dan Liljenquist candidate (could he pull off an upset?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Utah,_2012

Who's next?

Or take this experiment last year  from The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), known as CERN:

"Geneva, 25 August 2011. In a paper published in the journal Nature today, the CLOUD¹ experiment at CERN² has reported its first results. The CLOUD experiment has been designed to study the effect of cosmic rays on the formation of atmospheric aerosols - tiny liquid or solid particles suspended in the atmosphere - under controlled laboratory conditions. Atmospheric aerosols are thought to be responsible for a large fraction of the seeds that form cloud droplets. Understanding the process of aerosol formation is therefore important for understanding the climate."

"The CLOUD results show that trace vapours assumed until now to account for aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can explain only a tiny fraction of the observed atmospheric aerosol production. The results also show that ionisation from cosmic rays significantly enhances aerosol formation."

“It was a big surprise to find that aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere isn’t due to sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone,”

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/releases2011/PR15.11E.html

Current AGW theory. You mean the various IPCC assessments and the hockey stick?

"Cosmic Rays, at least at energies lower than 10¹⁵eV, are accelerated by supernova remnants. In our galaxy, most supernovae are the result of the death of massive stars. In spiral galaxies like our own, most of the star formation takes place in the spiral arms."

Israeli physicist Nir Shaviv:

http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate

"The SKY experiment unequivocally demonstrates that more cosmic rays would imply more condensation nuclei in the atmosphere. "

http://www.sciencebits.com/SkyResults

In November, 2007 preliminary results were announced showing direction of origination of the 27 highest energy events were strongly correlated with the locations of active galactic nuclei"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_rays

Has there been any mention of Henrik Svensmark's foundational paper on cosmic rays and climate on Ricochet?

What a bunch of crap. Yes, much of the world is melting down as we watch, including our American part of the world, government propaganda and MSM complicity to the contrary.

Is this the most important or even a little important story?

My local MSM, CBS radio, carried this story as it's lede echoing all the DNC talking points in an attack on Romney.

Coming to an atrocity near you - the Atrocities Prevention Board!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-24/can-the-atrocities-prevention-board-define-atrocity-.html

"the APB will include representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security, the Joint Staff, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Vice President--all of whom are at the Assistant Secretary level or higher and have been appointed by name by their respective Principals. The APB will meet at least monthly to oversee the development and implementation of atrocity prevention and response policy, and additionally on an ad hoc basis to deal with urgent situations as they arise.  The Chair of the APB will be the NSS Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. "

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/23/fact-sheet-comprehensive-strategy-and-new-tools-prevent-and-respond-atro

"Who you gonna call? The APB!"

I understand that the Nazis were the National Socialist German Workers' Party. But social scientists look at the political spectrum like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/European-political-spectrum.png/766px-European-political-spectrum.png

"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
Elie Wiesel

Does chronicling and  remembrance serve any useful purpose? Apparently so, if the continual  justified outpouring of anti-fascist art and writing are any indication. We humans feel the need to remember, warn and remonstrate. Lest we forget, the Nazis are forced to relive their crimes in front us day after day, month after month, year after year in films, books and plays.

But are the crimes of Marxism, communism, socialism admitted equally?  These reports from North Korea  exceed any atrocity of the Nazis. Yet how many will hear this story, how many will admit this knowledge into their consciousness?

Oddly it was the French who collated the long, barbarous, bloody history of communism into one volume, one of the most important books of  our recent past. This terrible tale of a multigenerational Korean communist gulag will remain un-noted by conventional wisdom, to be added to some future edition of the chronicle which is The Black Book of Communism. Until such a day as the crimes of the right and the left, the crimes of the fascists and the communists are treated equally.

Things are looking up!

(the) "central story is based in fact, inspired by “a very precise group of young woman at Harvard, who I met them when I went back to visit. I’d been there in very political, radical, grim, grungy times, around 1969-70. These girls changed everything, they wore French perfume, dressed beautifully – and there were lots of them. But they’d have been unimaginable in my day.”

Do Stillman and  his damsels, each named after a flower, carry the scent of a change in the cultural wind?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXrjIrmek88

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/9228759/Whit-Stillman-on-Damsels-in-Distress.html

http://www.mmisi.org/ir/35_02/bowman.pdf