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Snow continues to fall in the foothills and Sierra Nevada, even dusting valley communities, but the weather system will continue moving southeast, leaving the Sacramento region later today. Places such as Roseville, El Dorado Hills and even Galt got various amounts of snow, while it has piled up at higher elevations. .... "We actually had some (snow) here at the weather office at Watt and El Camino," said National Weather Service meteorologist Angus Barkhuff. "This is certainly an unusually cold weather system for California. It's not often we get to see some snowflakes here in the Sacramento area."

Here is a Top 10 of reasons to scrooge the BLS report: 10. As noted, nearly 300,000 people disappeared from the labor force, yet the BLS reports no increase in "discouraged workers" or workers forced to take part-time jobs for economic reasons. 9. Private sector service jobs supposedly increased by 51,000, yet the National Institute of Purchasing Managers' (NIPM) survey shows that services employment fell during November. The unexpected drop in the NIPM report, which is a reasonably good advanced indicator of economic activity, doesn't square with the BLS report. 8. The reported improvement in services was driven by an...

SACRAMENTO, CA - With bone-chilling temperatures and the possibility of Sacramento snow in the forecast beginning Sunday night, Sacramento's Loaves and Fishes announced the opening of a temporary shelter for the homeless. The Delaney Center at 12th and Ahern streets in Sacramento was expected to open at 7 p.m. Sunday and could accomodate up to 50 people, according to Loaves and Fishes pastor David Moss. "This isn't just bone-chilling weather. This is life-threatening weather," Moss said. Forecasts called for temperatures to drop to 32 degrees Sunday night.

For a well over a decade, 57-year-old roofer and writer Joseph Jenkins has been advocating that we flush our toilets down the drain and put a bucket in the bathroom instead. When each bucket in his five bathrooms is full, he empties it in the compost pile in his backyard in rural Pennsylvania. Eventually he takes the resulting soil and spreads it over his vegetable garden as fertilizer. "It's an alternative sanitation system," says Jenkins, "where there is no waste." His 255-page Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, is in its third edition and has been translated into...

December 4, 2009 Tibetan singer Tashi Dondrup arrested over 'subversive' CD Tashi Dondrup: CDs sold out quickly Jane Macartney in Beijing Chinese authorities have arrested a popular young Tibetan singer, accusing him of composing subversive songs. Tashi Dondrup was detained yesterday afternoon while in hiding in the western city of Xining, capital of Qinghai province, where he had taken refuge after the authorities banned his music. The 30-year-old professional singer released an album titled Torture without Trace last month, sources told The Times. It comprises 13 songs expressing nostalgia for the exiled Dalai Lama and remembering the crackdown that followed...

AND NOW . . . amidst billowing clouds of fragrant, aromatic first- and second-hand premium cigar smoke. . . it is time for . . . that harmless, lovable little fuzz ball, the highly-trained broadcast specialist, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, from behind the golden EIB microphone, firmly ensconced in the prestigious Attila-the-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, serving humanity simply by showing up, and he’s not retiring until every American agrees with him, do NOT doubt him, with shrieks of joy at the mere mention of his name...

Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions. But the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship - eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly. To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments each...

It's getting hard to keep track of all the different ways people are attacking Friday's employment number. You've got TrimTabs which keeps banging the drum about the birth-death model. You've got folks talking about how it was all in temp work, or the public. Then there are those who point out all of the people who have left the workforce. David Rosenberg chimes in with another: that it just can't be right, because it doesn't jibe with the contraction in the services sector ------ A 1-IN-35 EVENT It’s remarkable nobody talks about this. The big surprise in the payroll data...

1. Rachel Uchitel. The club hostess was the first of the women to be linked to Woods after the National Enquirer reported that she traveled to Australia to be with Woods during a golf tournament there. 2. Jamie Grubbs. The 24-year-old reality show contestant and cocktail waitress claims she carried on a 31-month-long affair with Woods until his crash last month. She offered a Woods voicemail to prove it. 3. Kalika Moquin. The 27-year-old club manager from Las Vegas is reported to have had a brief sexual relationship with Woods. 4. Cori Rist. The 31-year-old swimsuit model reportedly met Woods...

I've heard many politicians and individuals claim to be "Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative", but I've seen little evidence anyone behaving this way. It seems like those who gave themselves this title have gone alone with the President's stimulus. I'm curious if anyone give give some examples of any politicians who really is Socially Liberal but Fiscally Conservative.

NEW YORK Tomorrow 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the perhaps unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. Many if not most will publish it on the front page, warning of a "profound emergency." The Guardian of London, which helped draft the editorial, published it today, with a note at the end. Here it is. * Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past...

Participants at the Copenhagen global climate summit opened talks Monday at the start of the holiday season, but they won't be surrounded by festive Christmas decor, according to Denmark's Foreign Ministry. Since Christmas is a religious holiday, it has no place at a United Nations event, said officials planning the event. A sponsor providing fir trees for the conference's Christmas trees learned this the hard way when it was turned away by planners of the international event, the Copenhagen Post reported.

The embattled Razzle Dazzle Czar, White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers says that the Obamas were planning a "non-religious Christmas." According to the Sunday New York Times the confession emerged at a luncheon earlier this year with former White House social secretaries. The ladies must have choked on their Caesar salads when Rogers went on to announce that the Obamas did not intend to display the Christmas Creche--the manger scene that traditionally occupies a central spot in the East Room. (This revelation reportedly drew a gasp from the retired social secretaries). The idea was that the absence of the Creche...

Most look to loan type and equity position as two of the most important factors when forecasting loan default. In fact, I believe that epidemic negative-equity is the overarching reason that the default, foreclosure and housing crisis remains in the early innings. But…negative-equity with a caveat. While negative equity is a threat in and of itself, being in an over-leveraged household debt position is the true default catalyst for most in a negative-equity position. And being over-leveraged is also the primary default catalyst for those is a positive equity position. Being in a negative-equity position with lots of top line...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's government will pay compensation to the families of civilian victims of September's German-ordered air strike in Afghanistan which Kabul says killed 30 civilians as well as insurgents, a spokesman said on Monday. A defence ministry spokesman told reporters that German officials had been in contact with a lawyer representing the victims' relatives. "We have said we will be in touch with him to discuss the demands for compensation. We will look at how this is to be done in concrete terms," Defence Ministry spokesman Christian Dienst said at a regular government news conference. "The question will...

A teenager who survived a highway crash last June that killed four of her classmates is recovering from additional injuries she suffered early Tuesday morning when an SUV crashed through the wall of her bedroom. Shannon Broome was one of nine teenagers inside a Ford Explorer headed to the beach on the last day of school when a tire blew out and the SUV rolled over three times. Four teenagers died, and the other five were injured. Six months after the wreck, she had mostly recovered from injuries from the June wreck when she had another brush with death. Broome...

The new assessment of the $700 billion bailout program, provided by two Treasury officials on Sunday ahead of a report to Congress on Monday, is vastly improved from the Obama administration’s estimates last summer of $341 billion in potential losses from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. That figure anticipated more financial troubles requiring intervention. The officials said the government could ultimately lose $100 billion more from the bailout program in new loans to banks, aid to troubled homeowners and credit to small businesses. The report could tamp down some of the public anger directed against both parties over the bailouts....

COPENHAGEN (AFP) – Saudia Arabia told global warming talks on Monday that trust in climate science had been "shaken" by leaked emails among experts and called for an international probe. "The level of trust is definitely shaken, especially now that we are about to conclude an agreement that ... is going to mean sacrifices for our economies," said Mohammed al-Sabban, the kingdom's top climate negotiator, told delegates at the opening of December 7-18 UN talks. Al-Sabban called for an "independent" international investigation, but said that the UN climate science body was unqualified to carry it out.

WASHINGTON – Officials tell The Associated Press that the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded greenhouse gases are endangering people's health and must be regulated. The EPA will announced its findings at a news conference Monday. The announcement is timed to boost the Obama administration's arguments at an international climate conference — beginning this week — that the United States is taking actions to combat global warming, even though Congress has yet to act on climate legislation. Under a Supreme Court ruling, the so-called endangerment finding is needed before the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases released...

Introductory Remarks: On December 7, 1941, U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii were attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Could this tragic event that resulted in over 3,000 Americans killed and injured in a single two-hour attack have been averted? After 16 years of uncovering documents through the Freedom of Information Act, journalist and historian Robert Stinnett charges in his book, Day of Deceit, that U.S. government leaders at the highest level not only knew that a Japanese attack was imminent, but that they had deliberately engaged in policies intended to provoke the attack, in order to draw...

Many fans of the television series Sex and the City are shocked and disappointed when they read the Candace Bushnell book that inspired it. In the print version of the tale, there is no supportive sisterhood of single friends, no light-hearted banter, no suggestion that anyone actually finds fulfillment in cocktails, casual sex, and Manolo Blahniks — only a cast of cynical, lonely, and alienated men and women jaded by the predatory New York dating scene. A recent collection of “True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts” paints an equally harsh picture of the modern battle of the...

Dozens of girls succeeded early Monday afternoon in preventing building freeze inspectors from entering the community of Maaleh Levonah in Samaria while a second group of girls surrounded inspectors in Revava until special Yassam policemen arrived and pushed the youth out of the way, allowing the inspectors to make a quick getaway. Police remained and punched Deputy Regional Council Chairman Reuven Ben Aryeh, who required hospitalization...

Researchers have discovered the remains of a Japanese mini-submarine they say was used to attack Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 1941, the Los Angeles Times reports. The discovery provides evidence that the submarine fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row and could therefore resolve a long-standing dispute among historians, the paper reports. Five mini-submarines were intended to be used to launch a strike against Pearl Harbor, but four ended up not being used for various reasons, the paper reports. No one knew what happened with the fifth sub. New evidence now indicates that the remaining sub fired its two 800-pound torpedoes...

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (WCCO) ― Sarah Palin is bringing her book tour for "Going Rogue" to Minnesota. The former Vice Presidential Candidate and former Alaska Governor will sign copies of her new book at the Mall of America. Palin burst onto the national political stage last year after giving a speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. Now Palin brings hundreds of her admirers out to get a glimpse of this maverick of a politician. The excitement surrounding her book tour hits the Twin Cities on Monday. "She seems more real world ... not an average politician," said Jason...

It is difficult to turn on a TV or radio or pick up a newspaper these days without finding some pundit or other deploring the dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace or the dreadful living conditions of the Palestinians. Even supposedly neutral news reporters regularly repeat this sad tale. “Very little is changing for the Palestinian people on the ground,” I heard BBC World Service Cairo correspondent Christian Fraser tell listeners three times in a 45-minute period the other evening. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I had spent that day in the West Bank’s largest city, Nablus. The city...

Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit. An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia. The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders. The row erupted when hundreds of...

On Saturday, joined by hundreds of friends, family and colleagues on a snowy December day in Yonkers, NY, we celebrated the life of Mark Pittman. Readers of The IRA who wish to express their thanks to Mark and show support for his family may make contributions to the Pittman Children’s College Fund, c/o Dr. William Karesh, 30B Pondview Road, Rye, NY 10580. Bob Ivry from Bloomberg News gave a remembrance of Mark, including reading the letter that his daughter Maggie Pittman posted on zerohedge to dispel rumors that her dad might have been murdered. Some members of the zerohedge family...

It's been a great year for many mutual fund investors. Standard & Poor's Equity Research reports that 165 equity mutual funds are up at least 47% through Oct. 31, or at least double the return of the S&P 500. While investors in those funds should feel euphoric, S&P is quick to issue a warning to investors who might fall victim to those seductive returns. The S&P report, issued Friday, indicates that many of the best-performing funds relied on short-term strategies and paid little attention to the underlying fundamentals of the stocks in their portfolios, which could lead to a performance...

80% Chance Of A Market Crash In The Next Year John P. Hussman, PhDDec. 7, 2009, 6:12 AM The following is an excerpt from fund manager John Hussman's weekly letter. You can read the whole thing here. I noted last week that from a Bayesian perspective, I would estimate a probability of nearly 80% that we will observe a second round of credit losses coupled with a market plunge in the coming year or so. That doesn't imply an all-out “crash,” but more likely a retreat similar in size to what we have often observed following other post-crash rebounds (about...

The Constitution of the United States is the most important document in United States history following The Declaration of Independence. It was signed September 17, 1787 by George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin ... with "the Unanimous Consent of the States" ... The Constitution establishes the legislative powers that govern our nation via Congress "which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." ... Just two years later in 1789 the Bill of Rights was established "in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers" by adding ten (10) Amendments to the Constitution. Over the next...

What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU)....

The government is gathering evidence to make it clear that al Shabaab was responsible for the recent suicide bombing of a university graduation ceremony in Mogadishu. Many of the graduates were medical specialists, which Somalia is desperately short of. In cases like this, where a bombing attack creates great public anger against the attacker, the terrorists responsible either remain silent, or, if suspected, deny responsibility. This attack had al Shabaab written all over it, and there's no mystery why it was carried out. The attacker was a man disguised as a woman (wearing a burqa). Four government ministers were killed...

About 46.6 Million Filers Were "Nonpayers" Due to Exemptions, Deductions, Credits Washington, DC, December 4, 2009 -- Nearly one-third of the 143 million federal income tax returns filed in 2007 resulted in no tax payment, according to a Tax Foundation analysis of IRS data. That means the tax filers got back every dollar that had been withheld from their paychecks, and often more. Roughly 46.6 million tax returns, or 32.6 percent, are filed by such "nonpayers," people whose exemptions, deductions and credits wiped out any federal income tax due. "In about half the cases, additional money was 'refunded' to these...

View to 2010: Downside Risks At Least As Great As Upside Potential J.D. Steinhilber December 07, 2009 Our stock market outlook is neutral as we move towards the end of 2009. The weight of the evidence seems to favor a continuation of the bull market into the first half of 2010, with the potential for additional gains in the broad averages of 10% to perhaps 20%. However, we expect bear market conditions will return at some point next year. The performance of the economy and corporate earnings will disappoint, as the private sector continues its deleveraging process, and government stimulus...

The first major winter storm of the season will strike parts of Southwestern and north-central United States between Monday and Wednesday, causing widespread power outages and making travel nearly impossible, forecasters said...Dangerous Arctic air could spill southward by midweek. The Midwest and northern Plains will experience wind chills of 30 to 40 degrees below zero...Many temperatures will be below zero Thursday morning, and daytime highs will struggle to make it out of the single digits across the Upper Great Lakes, according to forecasters.

The Destruction Of The Dollar: It's Nearly Inevitable by: Paco Ahlgren December 07, 2009 "We have experienced asset bubbles, and we now have an economy that is more highly leveraged than it ever has been in the post-World-War II period. Greenspan has been instrumental in bringing about this high leverage." -- Paul Kasriel “A dollar saved is a quarter earned.” -- John Ciardi I have been an analyst, a portfolio manager, and a financial writer for more than 18 years, and until early last year my focus was almost exclusively on individual stocks and value investing. In my book Discipline,...

"75% support for the ban on minarets in London Daily News poll," from the London Daily News, December 4" http://www.thelondondailynews.com/londoners-support-calls-minarets-capital-p-3609.html

Barack Obama last night honoured five of the nation's top artists with the Kennedy Center Honors this weekend. Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro and comic genius Mel Brooks took centre stage during a show attended by the U.S. President and other power players from Washington and Hollywood. Also receiving the honors - which recognise individuals who have defined American culture through the arts as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy - are jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck and opera singer Grace Bumbry. About 300 guests, including Jack Black, Edward Norton, Matthew Broderick, Ben Stiller, Martin Scorsese, Sting, Philip...

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network’s top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said. According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR’s executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network’s supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network. At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that...

One of the red-hot aspects of the very heated political debate over a national health insurance system is whether millions of illegal immigrants – a quarter of whom live in California – will be included or excluded.

Gay advocates will push to replace freshman Sen. Joseph Addabbo. Gay advocates are on the warpath after the state Senate killed same-sex marriage last week, and few Democratic senators who voted against the bill are safe from their wrath.After spending more than $1 million to help the Democrats retake the chamber for the first time in decades, powerful gay activists and donors say they'll support challengers against anti-gay-marriage senators in 2010. "It's going to be a bloodbath," one gay operative predicted. "We're going to use every single weapon in our quiver to take these people out. We either need to...

Nearly 100 world leaders are expected to appear at the global warming talks that open Monday in Copenhagen. This is an unprecedented showing of leadership for the issue. Yet at the same time, public opinion of climate change is souring — particularly in the United States. A recent Harris Poll, among the latest of several over the past year, shows that barely half of the American public believes that the carbon dioxide that's building up in the atmosphere could warm up our planet.

Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings. Copenhagen's city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to 'Be sustainable - don't buy sex'. "Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes," the approach to hotels says. Now, Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms, saying that...

Obama has surrounded himself with a host of vehemently ant-Israel advisors including Lee Hamilton, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Gen Jones, many of who advocate imposing a solution on Israel. So it was no surprise that he started his term of office by attacking Israel, America’s best and most steadfast ally, and demanding a complete settlement freeze east of the greenline including Jerusalem. He went so far as to repudiate the US commitment set out in the Bush ’04 letter to Sharon saying there was no agreement. Elliot Abrams and others involved in the negotiations which led to...

Translation from Spanish. The link is directly to the Spanish article. The Family That Shoots Together... The traditionalist American society owns nationalist websites from which they encourage patriotic defense through guns and 'merchandising.' (Body of article) Sarah Palin doesn't renounce her passion for hunting. To the contrary, she's proud of it in her last book: 'There's room for excess for all the animals of Alaska, together with the side of potatoes.' If 52% of Americans disapprove of Palin, those that approve have formed a strong opinion of her because they consider her the best example of that white America, lover...

The projected long-term cost of the government's bailout of the nation's big banks is going to be at least $200 billion less than previously thought, a United States Treasury Department official said Sunday. The Obama administration had estimated the cost to taxpayers of the $700-billion Troubled Asset relief Program, or TARP, would be $341 billion but now says it can cut that by $200 billion. "That improvement is driven by the fact that Treasury's investments to stabilize the system are delivering higher returns than anticipated and that Treasury does not anticipate having to draw upon the full $700 billion in...

Jimmy Carter had his Misery Index (MI) which helped end his presidency. Here’s Barack Obama’s equivalent: the BOMI (Barack Obama Misery Index). It measures how much misery Obama is causing us: The BOMI includes measurements of: 1) Unemployment 2) The pump price of a gallon of gasoline 3) The price of an ounce of gold 4) Home foreclosures 5) The Expectation Index 6) Food Stamp usage To establish a baseline and give BOMI a starting point of ZERO, each category’s weight was set at zero at the beginning of Obama’s administration. The “then and now” comparison using factor analysis for...

The situation in neighboring Venezuela is going from strange to foreboding. President Hugo Chavez has been unsuccessful in getting the voters to make him president for life, but he has used his presidential powers to replace thousands of key officials with people selected mainly for their loyalty to Hugo Chavez. Since the government controls so much of the economy (mainly because of the oil industry), this has had disastrous results. There are increasing power blackouts, and an increasing number of state employees are not getting paid, or paid on time. There are increasing shortages of consumer goods. There is growing...

Welcome to the Quinn and Rose thread to tie us over till sneakers posts her ever popular live thread. You can visit them at www.warroom.com Check out their podcast at www.wpgb.com

The thing to understand about the 12-day UN meeting on climate change starting in Copenhagen today, is it's not an environmental conference. It's an economic mugging. That it's not about saving the planet. It's about making you poorer. And finally, that the "solutions" it proposes to "fix" the climate, far from being intended to succeed, are guaranteed to fail. How do we know? Because they've already failed. The two major initiatives that emerged out of the UN process that created the Kyoto accord, were the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which is a multi-billion-dollar European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions,...