University of Iowa First to Offer ‘Transgender’ Option on Admissions Application

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IOWA CITY, Iowa – The University of Iowa has become the first public U.S. university to include optional questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on its application, a move hailed Wednesday by advocates hoping to improve the college experience for gays and lesbians.

University officials say the move sends a strong signal that they value the diversity that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students bring to campus. They say that knowing some students’ sexual orientation will allow them to track their enrollment and graduation rates and promote housing, student groups and programs that might improve their social and academic success.

“This is a question whose time had come,” university admissions director Michael Barron said.

Iowa’s decision was praised by Campus Pride, an advocacy group that has been lobbying colleges to ask the questions so schools can track the progress of LGBT students. Elmhurst College, a private liberal-arts school in suburban Chicago, became the first — and is still the only other — college to do so last year.

Iowa’s new application, which went into use Dec. 1, asks students whether they “identify with the LGBTQ Community.” The item is listed with other optional questions about topics such as their interest in military programs and fraternities and sororities. A second change added “transgender” as an option for an applicant’s gender.

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How Much Taxation Would it Take to Fund the Federal Budget?

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photo credit: marcus demery

To best understand this spending aspect of the current budget negotiations in Washington, we must answer one crucial question: how much taxation on the top income-earners would be required to fully fund the present level of government spending?

To do so, we must first make the unreasonable assumption that the rich will not respond to confiscatory tax rates and hide money from being taxed. This is unreasonable because no scheme of taxation since WW2 has been able to capture more than 21% of GDP. With current spending levels around 23% of GDP, history suggests that no level of taxation we have yet tried would actually fully fund our current level of spending. But if we indulged some “static scoring” and assumed a static tax base, what would a zero-deficit, soak-the-rich taxation scheme look like at current spending levels?

For example, what would a 100% income tax on all those who earn over $10 million amount to? I’m not taking about a wimpy marginal rate, where one might tax only those dollars of income over $10 million (leaving the taxpayer $10 million). No, I’m saying you find all those who made more than $10 million and take every last penny — an absolute tax of 100%.

Using 2009 data, the IRS says that 8,274 tax returns were filed with incomes over $10 million. The total amount of income on those returns was $240.1 billion.

Our federal government alone is spending more than $10 billion a day. Thus, a 100% confiscation of all income of those making more than $10 million would amount to less than 24 days of federal spending.

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Michele Bachmann Says Obama Wants to ‘Lift Up the Islamists’ and Allow Sharia Law in America

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Representative Michele Bachmann has claimed that Barack Obama is determined ‘to lift up the Islamists’ and bow to their ‘ultimate demand’ of imposing Sharia law on America.

In an extraordinary interview at the weekend, the woman who once had high hopes of being the Republican candidate in this year’s presidential election, said that Americans should study Islamist texts just as those worried about fascism pored over Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in the 1930s and 1940s.

In an extended on-air conversation with conservative radio hosts Jan Markell and Eric Barger, Bachmann contended that Obama was endangering the United States and Israel by supporting radical Islamists.

‘President Obama, if you look at nearly every decision he has made about this issue, it is to lift up the Islamists and to take down Israel.’

The congresswoman, who won the Republican presidential straw poll in Ames, Iowa, in 2011 and who narrowly won re-election to the House of Representatives last month, said that Americans who are not Islamists will ‘lose their right of speech and expression’ because there was ‘no tolerance for dissent or disagreeing in any way with the goals or the beliefs of the Islamists’.

She said: ‘Not just verbal speech, but written, a cartoon, a painting, whatever it is, if it is in any way construed as being against Islam that is where the confrontation comes from the Islamist world and they want to stop anyone in the world from saying anything negative about Islam.

‘Which means there is only one free speech right and that would belong to the Islamists. Everyone else would lose their right of speech and expression.’

It would be ‘game over’ for America’ if free speech were denied because ‘once you criminalised anti-Islamic speech, anything that we would say that would be critical in any way of anything Islam does would be considered criminalised.’

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Census: Whites No Longer a Majority in US by 2043

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photo credit: hyku

WASHINGTON (AP) — White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2043, according to new census projections. That’s part of a historic shift that already is reshaping the nation’s schools, workforce and electorate, and is redefining long-held notions of race.

The official projection, released Wednesday by the Census Bureau, now places the tipping point for the white majority a year later than previous estimates, which were made before the impact of the recent economic downturn was fully known.

America continues to grow and become more diverse due to higher birth rates among minorities, particularly for Hispanics who entered the U.S. at the height of the immigration boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since the mid-2000 housing bust, however, the arrival of millions of new immigrants from Mexico and other nations has slowed from its once-torrid pace.

The country’s changing demographic mosaic has stark political implications, shown clearly in last month’s election that gave President Barack Obama a second term – in no small part due to his support from 78 percent of non-white voters.

There are social and economic ramifications, as well. Longstanding fights over civil rights and racial equality are going in new directions, promising to reshape race relations and common notions of being a “minority.” White plaintiffs now before the Supreme Court argue that special protections for racial and ethnic minorities dating back to the 1960s may no longer be needed, from affirmative action in college admissions to the Voting Rights Act, designed for states with a history of disenfranchising blacks.

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600 Workers To Be Fired As Controversial Activist Judge Sides With Obama-NLRB And SEIU Strikers

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A Democrat-appointed federal judge with a controversial past and a “weird record of empathy for those accused of sexual crimes involving children” has sided with Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board and the Service Employees International Union by ordering a nursing home chain whose SEIU workers are striking to reinstate the strikers. The judge’s decision to side with the NLRB and SEIU will cause more than 600 replacement caregivers’ employment to be terminated.

To make matters worse, among those who will be reinstated will be SEIU strikers who are alleged to have committed acts of sabotage against nursing home residents (including Alzheimer’s patients) when the union struck back in July.

On Tuesday, federal judge Robert N. Chatigny weighed in on a nearly two-year old labor battle between SEIU-affiliated New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 and New Jersey-based Healthbridge Management by granting an injunction to temporarily halt to Healthbridge Management’s June implementation of its “last, best and final offer.”

At issue is whether Healthbridge management and the union were, after 19 months of negotiations, at a lawful impasse when the company implemented its final offer in June.

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Checking Facebook at Work Could Become Illegal

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photo credit: ideagirlmedia

Logging into Facebook, perusing eBay and surfing to other decidedly non-work related sites may not just upset your boss; it could also be a federal offense.

That’s according to two Boston College professors who recently authored a paper on how a broad interpretation of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) could criminalize the routine behavior of every employee who uses a workplace computer in their job.

As the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal interpret it, a breach of a company’s computer policy for example a ban on accessing dating sites and social media for example, also constitutes a violation of the CFAA.

The law was originally written to punish and deter criminal hacking, but as technology experts point out, innovation in technology has outpaced the laws that govern it.

The CFAA, a 1986 law that predates HTTP and the Web as we know it, makes it a crime to “access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access … from [a] protected computer.” Based on the law’s own definitions, a “protected computer” is virtually any device with a microprocessor and a network connection. Today, virtually everyone “accesses” one when they point their browser to any webpage.

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Welcome to QE4!

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photo credit: dctim1

The actions of the Federal Reserve over the past 4 years exemplify insanity more than anything else in politics. They continue implementing one monetary stimulus policy after another in an attempt to jumpstart the economy, even though they keep failing in that goal. We had QE1,2,3 and Operations Twist 1 and 2. Now the Fed’s Open Market Committee has announced a new monetary stimulus package that can only be described as QE4.

Evidently, the economy was recovering enough for Obama to win reelection, but not enough to end the market distorting, dollar-destroying stimulus from the unelected governors at the Fed. So not only will the Fed continue purchasing $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities per month, they will engage in another round of buying long-term treasuries:

“To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee will continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month. The Committee also will purchase longer-term Treasury securities after its program to extend the average maturity of its holdings of Treasury securities is completed at the end of the year, initially at a pace of $45 billion per month. The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and, in January, will resume rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. Taken together, these actions should maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.”

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It’s Good to be Connected: Goldman Sachs’ Miniscule CFTC Fine Is A Joke

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photo credit: erikdanieldrost

Last week, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) slapped Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) with a $1.5 million fine over inadequate control measures in its trading system which allowed an employee to falsify trades worth $8.3 billion in 2007. (CFTC Orders Goldman, Sachs & Co., a Commission Registrant, to Pay $1.5 Million for Supervision Failures, CFTC Press Releases, Dec 7 2012)) Goldman lost $118 million in the process of unwinding the positions.

We believe the global investment bank has been lucky on both fronts: while the fine amount in itself is too small to be material to the bank, the loss from the position is but a fraction of what the bank could have potentially lost. After all, we have witnessed the damage that wrong multi-billion dollar trading decisions by a single individual can do to a bank’s reputation and business on two distinct occasions in the recent past – the unauthorized trading incident at UBS (NYSE:UBS) last year (see Questionable Risk Controls Cost UBS More than Rogue Trades) and the hedging portfolio loss at JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) this June (see JPMorgan’s Trading Losses Could Climb, Sold Profitable Securities To Cushion Impact).

We maintain a $127 price estimate for Goldman’s stock, which is about 5% above the current market price.

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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder Signs Right to Work Legislation Into Law

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It’s official: Michigan has become the 24th Right to Work state:

At a news conference at the George W. Romney Building steps away from the state Capitol, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) announced that he’d signed the contentious right-to-work measures that have sparked protests in the state.

Before dozens of reporters assembled inside a conference room on the building’s second floor, Snyder defended his move as one that would lead to ”more jobs coming to Michigan.”

The two bills bar unions from making contracts that require employees to pay labor dues. One bill dealt with public sector unions, exempting firefighters and police officers. The other covered the private sector.

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U.S. Military Sends Mystery Space Drone back Into Orbit, Mission Unknown

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The U.S. military launched its highly secretive unmanned $1 billion X-37B space plane into orbit today from Cape Canaveral on top of an Atlas V rocket.

The U.S. Air Force which operates the small, top-secret version of the space shuttle still will not say how long the third X-37B mission will last, nor what the vehicle will be doing in orbit.

Cloud coverage in the area had threatened to scupper today’s launch, but the skies cleared sufficiently for the classified mission to take-off on time at 1.03 p.m from the Florida space center.

It is the second flight for this original X-37B spaceplane. The craft circled the planet for seven months in 2010. A second X-37B spacecraft spent more than a year in orbit.

The high-tech mystery machines – 29 feet long – are about one-quarter the size of NASA’s old space shuttles and can land automatically on a runway.

The two previous touchdowns occurred in Southern California; this one might end on NASA’s three-mile-long runway once reserved for the space agency’s shuttles.

The military isn’t saying much if anything about this new secret mission known as OTV-3, or Orbital Test Vehicle, flight No. 3. In fact, launch commentary ended 17 minutes into the flight and a news blackout followed.

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