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This was sent to me by a friend employed by a large company in the financial sector Math By The Numbers 1. GLOBAL BUSINESS - 47% of the sales of the S&P 500 companies in calendar year 2009 were made outside the United States. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index of 500 widely held stocks that is generally considered representative of the US stock market (source: S&P). 2. THE DEAD RISE - On 8/13/79 (i.e., 31 years ago), BusinessWeek’s cover story was titled “The Death of Equities.” The S&P 500 closed at 107 on 8/13/79. The index closed at...

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the economy has yet to hit bottom, a sharply higher percentage than the 53% who felt that way in January," according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll. A growing and vocal minority of economists believes that there will be a double-dip recession primarily because of the intransigence of high unemployment and the rapidly faltering housing market. The notion of a "jobless recovery" has been around since the recessions of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a concept built on a relatively simple idea: employment lags during a recession but it is always part of...

Liberal groups try to exploit backlash against Target for helping anti-gay marriage candidate ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Protestors have been rallying outside Target Corp. or its stores almost daily since the retailer angered gay rights supporters and progressives by giving money to help a conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota. Liberal groups are pushing to make an example of the company, hoping its woes will deter other businesses from putting their corporate funds into elections. A national gay rights group is negotiating with Target officials, demanding that the firm balance the scale by making comparable donations to benefit candidates...

Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico democrat, introduced the Automatic IRA Act of 2010 last week. The new legislation would require all firms with 10 or more employees that don't already offer a retirement plan to automatically enroll workers in an IRA. Workers who don't wish to participate would need to take action to opt out or change the default contribution amount and investments. Here's a look at how this bill, if passed, would affect you: Standardized 3 percent savings rate. Employees age 18 and older who have been employed for at least three months would be automatically enrolled in...

Intel researchers are developing a "black box" similar to those used for aviation to record vehicle telemetry and other data. Having a black box, or event data recorders, in vehicles could help police investigate accidents or help insurance companies determine fault. It could also be connected to the vehicle diagnostics and control center to help determine if the car a working improperly or if driver error is responsible a vehicle malfunction (think: Prius and unintended acceleration).

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former long-time Russian Minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. "A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and the problem is...

It's been 56 days since the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon, and oil is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. Today, we want to know whether you think the US government or BP [BP 30.67 --- UNCH (0) ] is more to blame for not stopping the spill thus far. Share your opinion:

To aid embattled Sen. Harry Reid, the president has cut off funding for an unpopular nuclear-waste site in Nevada. The legal tab? About $50 billion. OUR ASS-KICKING PRESIDENT should take careful aim at his own derrière. He's triggered a less publicized environmental mess with costs that rival BP's deep-water oil spill. The difference is that taxpayers—not some energy company—will foot the bill. The legal costs alone could top $50 billion. And if Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada loses his tough re-election bid come November, then, to borrow a phrase from an Oval Office operative, it will be money down...

Robert Dacunto says the "American government is the biggest gangster in the world." Turns out he should know. Dacunto, 48, is part of a core group of Staten Island Tea Party volunteers known as the "road crew." They organize rallies, confront politicians, fire off letters to editors. In an interview, Dacunto trashed Social Security as a "massive Ponzi scheme" and said the Founding Fathers would be horrified to see the country they created. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/06/14/2010-06-14_he_wants_to_take_the_multi_out_of_cultural.html#ixzz0qps6RRSs

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama defensively and sometimes testily insisted on Thursday that his administration, not oil giant BP, was calling the shots in responding to the worst oil spill in the nation's history. "I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down," Obama declared at a news conference in the East Room of the White House. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill dominated the hour-long session. He called the spill, now in its sixth week, an "unprecedented disaster" and blasted a "scandalously close relationship" he said has persisted between Big...

No major Republican has opted to challenge her, and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is comfortably ahead of the three lesser-known GOP hopefuls who’ve announced for this year’s special Senate election in New York. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in New York State finds Gillibrand, once viewed as one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents, earning more than 50% support in two of the three contests and ahead by nearly 20 points in the third.

WASHINGTON – Immigration reform has become the first of President Barack Obama's major priorities dropped from the agenda of an election-year Congress facing voter disillusionment. Sounding the death knell was Obama himself. The president noted that lawmakers may lack the "appetite" to take on immigration while many of them are up for re-election and while another big legislative issue — climate change — is already on their plate. "I don't want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn't solve the problem," Obama told reporters Wednesday night aboard Air Force One.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama said Tuesday Washington must urgently confront unpleasant truths about deficits, while the Federal Reserve chairman said failure to mop up red-ink spending would "ultimately do great damage" to the country. Obama refused to rule out measures that would fight "exploding deficits." This signaled that politically toxic tax increases were options that could be under consideration by members of a panel he tasked with reducing federal deficits that threaten to erode Americans' standard of living. Obama explicitly told reporters in the White House's Rose Garden that neither he nor his commission members

216 Days to Nov.4 62 are Sat & Sun 4 are National Holidays 150 Weekdays

A Florida doctor who opposes the new health care law posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Obama to get care "elsewhere," the Orlando Sentinel reported. print email share recommend (12) A Florida doctor who opposes the new health care law posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Obama to get care "elsewhere," the Orlando Sentinel reported. The sign on Dr. Jack Cassell's door reads, "Changes to your health care begin right now. Not in four years," the Sentinel said. Cassell, a urologist, told the newspaper that he's...

Should America Bid Farewell to Exceptional Freedom? By Rep. Paul Ryan Last week, on March 21st, Congress enacted a new Intolerable Act. Congress passed the Health Care bill - or I should say, one political party passed it - over a swelling revolt by the American people. The reform is an atrocity. It mandates that every American must buy health insurance, under IRS scrutiny. It sets up an army of federal bureaucrats who ultimately decide for you how you should receive Health Care, what kind, and how much...or whether you don't qualify at all. Never has our government claimed the...

As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh. With the passage of ObamaCare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable. We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. ObamaCare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200-billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement. It will vastly...

WASHINGTON – Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it. The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach. Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle"...

I received this email that is being sent around, I don't know the origin. For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they didn't pay into Social Security, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform that is being considered...in...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is preparing to sign a transformative health care bill ushering in near-universal medical coverage for the first time in the nation's history -- and then hit the road to sell it to a reluctant public. Obama will travel to Iowa City, Iowa on Thursday, the White House said, as he now turns to seeing a companion bill through the Senate and selling the health care overhaul's benefits on behalf of House members who cast risky votes. It is most likely that he will sign the bill on Tuesday, but plans are not yet final,...