I hope you realize that hte only reason most politicians stay in power is gerrymandering. Whenever either party has the opportunity to take advantage of it they absolutely run with it. The problem is that those times happen infrequently and people forget by then what the other party did when it was their turn. Heck I've seen districts changed to include areas 5 or more miles away across a body of water in order to help the current in-power party candidate (D at the time).

The only things which are certain are death and taxes. That he wants to diversify his holdings is pretty understandable given how much of his wealth is all in one basket. Single stocks can rise and fall dramatically on a whim (see the iPrecious). And as chairman he will not be their forever and it is certainly better to lighten the stake while still remaining at the company and holding a good share than after leaving it.

By the way... there's a Red under your bed....

have you complained to your local postmaster? often the misdelivered items are because the person doing your route sucks or they just don't have a regular postman assigned. I went through a period like this where we lost a really good one, got the round robin thing for about a year and now we have a regular guy again who does a very good job.

UPS, FedEx or any other shipper is free right now to compete with USPS. The problem is they can't - the differences in scale are enormous.

You mean as opoosed to the "left wing nutjobs" who ran in 2008 and in 2012? Certainly Paul would not have expanded and would have reversed, if only be executive order, as much as he could. I think Mr. 999 also would have been more careful, at least domestically. Romney? Who knows where he really stood. Might he have tried to do what Obama has? Sure. But keep in mind too that whatever R would have been elected would have faced an impossible hurdle in the Senate. Obama has had the advtanage of a still large neo-con contingent in the house and his cronies in the senate to pass whatever he wants... that he doesn't just do by EO.

Your argument on choice is wrong - there are always other choices, one of which was to vote for Romney because he would not be able to get what he wanted out of the senate and might ultimately motivate enough to vote D in the midterms to retake the house too. I guess the weakness in that argument is that Bush rolled the Dems even when they had both houses.

I would add that not all "R"'s are praising, even in private, what Obama has done. You may recall that while it took a while, R's did start to distance themself from Bush after 2005, not in mass but a fairly good minority, and not just on the economic front. Unfortunately, the most visible R's and the leadership (ie, those who get on TV a lot) are the worst of the neocons.

What is so utterly depressing is the way the Dems, in general, love to beat Bush and republicans on Iraq and Patriot Act but not their leaders who voted in mass for the same, multiple times now. Nor do they call out the current leadership on expanding the write of DHS, FBI and other agencies under P.A. and hidden executive orders.

Don't let reality get in the way of the eco-commies. Can and should better efforts be made at the well head and over pipelines to capture leaks? Sure. But in the end, its not a significant contributor. From 2006:

Reall good huh! What suckers you all were to believe the "Obama is good on civil liberties!" line. The man has proven himself by word and deed to be even more evil than Bush and Cheney. Not only does he not reverse their policies, he expands and extends them. But not a peep out of his supporters because he's "their" guy.

not our fault that sunni and shia hate each other. wonder how the hazara are doing in afghanistan? everyone hates them.

Then I guess the really "cool" features you need are only supported under Windows 8? I honestly do not understand the implication behind many of these posts that the mfg. should provide drivers for every OS under the sun that you could put on the pc/laptop they designed to be used with just one os.

If people want/need that kind of support then buy components individually that meet your requirements and assemble yourself. But don't be crying or shocked that the mass marketer only wants to support the mass market.

Do you find it normal to whine about features that are no longer useful? Is your desktop really that barren of frequently used program icons that you must use the start menu functionality more than a handful of times a week? Are your most commonly changed settings that far away when clicking the charm menu vs start/control/subgroup/etc? Did you even try to find out if there might be other alternatives in place like... ctrl-x? Or just right clicking over the mini-start screen in the bottom left corner?

Its all there, some of it quicker to use, some of it perhaps a click further for less used items. Please, get on with your life and stop fixating on start menu.

its amazing how fast a line printer can chew through a box of paper when sent a binary file!

I wonder what the energy use of this project has been? 17 years? How many megawatthours? And what would be the 'carbon footprint' ?

is what I really want.. But I'll settle for an LA-120 until then this boring mono-chrome laser will have to do

(1) Because it is a government job with 24/7/365 demands. It is a cabinet position. If the head of DoD/Transportation/CIA was doing this you would be just as ok? "Well there's this war going on, but yeah I got some time to moonlight on stuff I used to do.... "

(2) Take a look at those scientists. I think you will find in man cases those in administrative roles are generally not the "elite" researchers/theorirsts. As I said, a background, either through schooling or work, may be helpful but should not be looked upon as making the person qualified to lead a large organization. And the scale of DOE and other top level agencies is enourmous. Of course, there are exceptions, one example might be Leon Lederman who managed research groups of increasing size up to heading Fermilab with good success, though even he failed to save the SSC which was a political victim to the ISS and "small" science.

The size and scope of many of the federal agencies, DOE included, make finding any competent adminstrator difficult. But the evaluation of scientific merits (if applicable) should occur long before anything crosses the desk of the secretary, who needs to make decisions based on resource constraints (money, time, staff, materials, etc) and politics (not in my district!).