UK’s Telegraph caught art and defiance in Mexico City.
Favors out in the open
Earmarks policy evolves under Obama:
These principles begin with a simple concept: Earmarks must have a legitimate and worthy public purpose. Earmarks that members do seek must be aired on those members’ websites in advance, so the public and the press can examine them and judge their merits for themselves. Each earmark must be open to scrutiny at public hearings, where members will have to justify their expense to the taxpayer.
Next, any earmark for a for-profit private company should be subject to the same competitive bidding requirements as other federal contracts. The awarding of earmarks to private companies is the single most corrupting element of this practice, as witnessed by some of the indictments and convictions that we’ve already seen. Private companies differ from the public entities that Americans rely on every day –- schools, and police stations, and fire departments.
When somebody is allocating money to those public entities, there’s some confidence that there’s going to be a public purpose. When they are given to private entities, you’ve got potential problems. You know, when you give it to public companies — public entities like fire departments, and if they are seeking taxpayer dollars, then I think all of us can feel some comfort that the state or municipality that’s of benefit is doing so because it’s going to trickle down and help the people in that community. When they’re private entities, then I believe they have to be evaluated with a higher level of scrutiny.
Furthermore, it should go without saying that an earmark must never be traded for political favors.
And finally, if my administration evaluates an earmark and determines that it has no legitimate public purpose, then we will seek to eliminate it, and we’ll work with Congress to do so.
Distributing illness
The list of difficult issues on our human agenda seems to increase, wot?
Q&A on swine flu with virus hunter Nathan Wolfe:
“We’ve created a perfect storm for viruses”
“For most of our history, we lived in geographically disparate populations. So viruses could enter from animals into humans, spread locally and go extinct. But the human population has gone through a connectivity explosion.
“All humans on the planet are now connected to each other spatially and temporally in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of vertebrate biology.
“Humans — as well as our domestic animals and wild animals we trade — move around the planet at biological warp speed.
“This provides new opportunities for viruses that would have gone extinct locally to have the population density fuel they need to establish themselves and spread globally. … we’ll continue to see … a whole range of new animal diseases as outbreaks in human populations. …
“Right now, global public health is like cardiology in the ’50s — just waiting for the heart attack, without understanding why they occur or the many ways to monitor for them, detect them early and ultimately prevent them.”
How did swine flu enter into the human population?
Swine flu has been known since at least the early part of the 20th century, since the 1930s. It was originally a virus of bird origin — all influenza viruses were originally bird viruses — and it probably spread to humans before it was in pigs.
A fine reply
Charlie Rose asks Bill Gates, “Do you have a role model?”
He answers, “I’d have to say Warren Buffet.” Charlie asks, “Why?”
Bill answers, “Because of his thoughtfulness, integrity, and joy.”
Now We All Hereby Proclaim
Office of the Press Secretary
————————————
For Immediate Release April 28, 2009
NATIONAL EQUAL PAY DAY, 2009
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 28, 2009, as National Equal Pay Day.
I call upon American men and women, and all employers, to acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination and to commit themselves to equal pay for equal work.
The Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials,