Er, I thought everyone knew by now that story was a bs fabrication of the right-wing media?

No, but I can understand why folks would want to spread that line. Here's an excerpt of the latest news on the subject:

The Oversight Committee .... is expressing gross dissatisfaction with Wilkins’s testimony and, in a letter sent to him on Wednesday, offering him the opportunity to amend it. “In your testimony, you stated ‘I don’t recall’ a staggering 80 times in full or partial response to the Committee’s questions,” committee chairman Darrell Issa and Ohio representative Jim Jordan wrote. “Your failure to recollect important aspects of the Committee’s investigation suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.” The most pertinent subject on which Wilkins’s memory failed him was the nature of his communications with Treasury Department officials: in particular, whether he discussed the applications of tea-party groups with anybody at the Treasury Department, whether he discussed with Treasury Department officials regulatory guidance for 501(c)(4) entities engaged in political activities, and whether he discussed with them the inspector general’s report that blew the lid off of the targeting scandal in mid May.

"I don't recall" is how you prevent later perjury charges when you're on the wrong side of an investigation and you're doing your best to cover your ass while not advancing the investigation. But you probably knew that.

When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted. Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.

It'll get worse for the IRS, now that it is enmeshed in partisan politics. President* Obama should be noted with an asterisk from here on out.

*Obama was re-elected in 2012 while the IRS was actively suppressing opposing groups, while rubber stamping liberal political action committees.

Most alternative reactor designs have some major flaw. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have pebble jams. (An experimental one in Germany is such a mess there's no way to fully decommission it.) Helium gas-cooled reactors leak helium. (Fort St. Vrain was converted from nuclear to natural gas because of that.) One of the painful lessons of long-life nuclear power plants is that what goes on inside the reactor vessel has to be really, really simple. Anything complex in there will break. It's being shot full of holes at the atomic level, after all. (See "hydrogen embrittlement"). Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors at least have only water to deal with. The fuel rods are solid rods. The thing is basically simple,

Came here to say this. Everything at a nuclear power plant is periodically taken apart to fix and clean on routine basis. Maintaining any of these exotic reactors always sounds like a nightmare.

I don't have to 'know the true dogma' to call out a probable liar. If you're not a liar, the line you used has been widely employed by liars, making it a self-defeating thing to say. See Seminar Caller.

I'm a lifelong democrat, but then i realized the more democrats win elections, the more they ruin the country.

You're not a RINO, you're a leftist. Anyone who makes claim to being a disillusioned 'life-long republican' is likely full of sh*t, especially if such claim follows a litany of cherry-picked, overblown complaints straight out of the Alinsky playbook for mocking opponents.

I'd like to point out the land around Three Mile Island, the site of the worst pressurized water reactor accident, is perfectly inhabitable, and the other unit on that site continues to run with an excellent safety record. Having a proper containment building helps a great deal.

That's no defense against your callousness and shifting position. However, if cursing me helps you avoid any introspection that might upset you, please continue.

So, DerekLyons there bought individual health insurance on the open market, exactly as you advocated in the previous post, and you don't give a sh*t and may not even understand. The "Affordable" Care Act made his independantly bought insurance unaffordable. You casually moved the goalposts in this reply, and you blatantantly dismissed the fact that his personal situation got markedly worse.

This marks you as the jerk who will wreck good deals you're not party to because you have some f*cking pie in the sky grand design. In any case, damn near everyone who has been losing their coverage because of the ACA has been an independant purchaser. The policy you advocate is going backwards.

Yet you say 'So What?'

Waffle Iron is the sort of person I warned about- perfectly happen to f*ck up deals he's not party to, because he has a grand vision of how things should be that can't possibly be wrong.

You underestimate the ambition of those that would be your masters. They're so enamored with their own supposed righteousness and capability that they'll destroy anything that stands between them and the implementation of their grand vision.

Note that the Affordable Care act is now resposible for far more people losing their plans ("You can keep your plan if you like it." and if it conforms to the massively expensive requirements now in effect.) than gaining new coverage. But hey, the people who rammed this bill down our throats have good intentions, so let's excuse the actual destruction we're in the middle of experiencing.

Your understanding is incorrect. There is nothing particularly special about anti-ship missiles and there are no anti-ship missiles that cannot be intercepted by the myriad active defense systems that currently protect the US Navy. The cost is also asymmetric; intercepting an anti-ship missile is much cheaper than the anti-ship missile, so it is difficult to make it up in volume.

There is nothing that flies through the air that cannot be hit by modern active intercept technologies. The trend away from heavy armor is due in part to this technical development; you don't need armor if it is inexpensive to ensure no one can hit you.

I'm pulling that from my own personal experiences, my observations, and a great deal of reading over the years. Do you want a bibliography for a slashdot comment? Perhaps some footnotes? Don't be pedantic. If you disagree, say so and why. That cute little stick figure holding up a sign that says 'citation needed' got old a while ago.

In theory this sounds very sensible, but it would cost more to tailor curriculum to individual student needs rather than the usual uniform lesson platform and standard droning delivery method (which reaches a minority of students).

You don't need to be that specific- in my high school, we had three different levels for most topics- Gen Ed, College Prep, and Honors. It seemed to be a reasonable seperation of students into relatable groups.

I just listened to Malcolm Gladwell's latest book (I forget the title), and he makes the point that a small class size is also a detriment to learning. Apparently the ideal class size is 18-24 students- too few and the classroom energy goes down and the students are like siblings in the back of a car.