Congressional Reform Act of 2010
Congressional Reform Act of 2010
1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
2. No Tenure / No Pension:
A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, Congress participates with the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, server your term(s), then go home and back to work.
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans..
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people..
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.
The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
While I think something like this has a snowball's chance as long as we have the foxes guarding the hen house, it sure would be nice to yank these idiot's chain with!
via
1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
2. No Tenure / No Pension:
A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, Congress participates with the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, server your term(s), then go home and back to work.
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans..
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people..
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.
The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
While I think something like this has a snowball's chance as long as we have the foxes guarding the hen house, it sure would be nice to yank these idiot's chain with!
via
Yes, please...
The Winter Olympics may be getting dismal local ratings, but if the pleas of pole dancers across the world to have their "sport" recognized by the Olympics are heeded, we've got a feeling ratings would shoot through the roof.
"After a great deal of feedback from the pole dance community, many of us have decided that it's about time pole fitness is recognized as a competitive sport, and what better way for recognition than to be part of the 2012 Olympics held in London," British pole dancer KT Coates writes in an email to the Associated Press.
Apparently top pole dancers train like Olympic athletes, and once you remove the g-strings and sweaty dollar bills, is it really that much different than things like ice dancing and rhythmic gymnastics?
Pole dancing has taken off as a fitness craze lately, too, but even though there is a U.S. Pole Dance Federation which hosts championships there's still a need to standardize scoring and technique.
Pulling off an Elevated Booty Clap might net you big points in Miami, but places like Los Angeles tend to value moves like the Fake Titty Twister 360.
Plus, the AP article doesn't even breech whether or not the competition would be open to both sexes (maybe Johnny Weir can win Gold after all...)
We doubt we'll see it in the Olympics anytime soon. Just like we doubt we'll ever see Miami ever host an Olympics, but if that ever does happen we sure as hell wouldn't mind seeing it at least featured as an exposition sport.
DAVE RUN ! ! ! !
Our cousin Souper Dave is going to college at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska and when I saw this I thought of him!!!Too funny...
I was trying to call my bank to dispute a fee and forgot to dial the 800 number and just entered my bank account number. Some guy in Ohio answered and we had a very nice, albeit short, conversation. I appreciate that. When I misdial I always apologize and try to nice and when some one calls me by mistake I do the same.
Not all people are courteous and that irks me.
What does it cost to be nice? Nothing. But the rewards are infinite. Me and some unnamed dude in Ohio just hooked up in error and had a nice little chat. He has a story about how some fella in California has his phone number as a bank account and I know that if I make the same mistake that I can learn Ohio trivia and have a nice conversation.
Not all people are courteous and that irks me.
What does it cost to be nice? Nothing. But the rewards are infinite. Me and some unnamed dude in Ohio just hooked up in error and had a nice little chat. He has a story about how some fella in California has his phone number as a bank account and I know that if I make the same mistake that I can learn Ohio trivia and have a nice conversation.
Taught him.
Moral of the story: never start a fight with a 67-year-old guy that wears a shirt saying
"I AM A MOTHERF**KER"
The Night I Met Einstein - by Jerome Weidman
When I was a very young man, just beginning to make my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a distinguished New York philanthropist. After dinner our hostess led us to an enormous drawing room. Other guests were pouring in, and my eyes beheld two unnerving sights: servants were arranging small gilt chairs in long, neat rows; and up front, leaning against the wall, were musical instruments. Apparently I was in for an evening of Chamber music.
I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone deaf. Only with great effort can I carry the simplest tune, and serious music was to me no more than an arrangement of noises. So I did what I always did when trapped: I sat down and when the music started I fixed my face in what I hoped was an expression of intelligent appreciation, closed my ears from the inside and submerged myself in my own completely irrelevant thoughts.
After a while, becoming aware that the people around me were applauding, I concluded it was safe to unplug my ears. At once I heard a gentle but surprisingly penetrating voice on my right.
“You are fond of Bach?” the voice said.
I knew as much about Bach as I know about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with the renowned shock of untidy white hair and the ever-present pipe between the teeth. I was sitting next to Albert Einstein.
“Well,” I said uncomfortably, and hesitated. I had been asked a casual question. All I had to do was be I equally casual in my reply. But I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary eyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small.
“I don’t know anything about Bach,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve never heard any of his music.”
A look of perplexed astonishment washed across Einstein’s mobile face.
“You have never heard Bach?”
He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”
A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly, “You will come with me?”
He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it.
Resolutely he led me upstairs. He obviously knew the house well. On the floor above he opened the door into a book-lined study, drew me in and shut the door.
“Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”
“All my life,” I said, feeling awful. “I wish you would go back downstairs and listen, Dr. Einstein. The fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t matter.”
He shook his head and scowled, as though I had introduced an irrelevance.
“Tell me, please,” he said. “Is there any kind of music that you do like?”
“Well,” I answered, “I like songs that have words, and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”
He smiled and nodded, obviously pleased. “You can give me an example, perhaps?”
“Well,” I ventured, “almost anything by Bing Crosby.”
He nodded again, briskly. “Good!”
He went to a corner of the room, opened a phonograph and started pulling out records. I watched him uneasily. At last he beamed. “Ah!” he said.
He put the record on and in a moment the study was filled with the relaxed, lilting strains of Bing Crosby’s “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Einstein beamed at me and kept time with the stem of his pipe. After three or four phrases he stopped the phonograph.
“Now,” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what you have just heard?”
The simplest answer seemed to be to sing the lines. I did just that, trying desperately to stay on tune and keep my voice from cracking. The expression on Einstein’s face was like the sunrise.
“You see!” he cried with delight when I finished. “You do have an ear!”
I mumbled something about this being one of my favorite songs, something I had heard hundreds of times, so that it didn’t really prove anything.
“Nonsense!” said Einstein. “It proves everything! Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in school? Suppose, at your very first contact with numbers, your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem in, say, long division or fractions. Could you have done so?”
“No, of course not.”
“Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipestem. “It would have been impossible and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division and fractions. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division and fractions.”
The pipestem went up and out in another wave.
“But on your first day no teacher would be so foolish. He would start you with elementary things - then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems, he would lead you up to long division and to fractions.”
“So it is with music.” Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record. “This simple, charming little song is like simple addition or subtraction. You have mastered it. Now we go on to something more complicated.”
He found another record and set it going. The golden voice of John McCormack singing “The Trumpeter” filled the room. After a few lines Einstein stopped the record.
“So!” he said. “You will sing that back to me, please?”
I did - with a good deal of self-consciousness but with, for me, a surprising degree of accuracy. Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of my father as he listened to me deliver the valedictory address at my high school graduation.
“Excellent!” Einstein remarked when I finished. “Wonderful! Now this!”
“This” proved to be Caruso in what was to me a completely unrecognizable fragment from “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Nevertheless, I managed to reproduce an approximation of the sounds the famous tenor had made. Einstein beamed his approval.
Caruso was followed by at least a dozen others. I could not shake my feeling of awe over the way this great man, into whose company I had been thrown by chance, was completely preoccupied by what we were doing, as though I were his sole concern.
We came at last to recordings of music without words, which I was instructed to reproduce by humming. When I reached for a high note, Einstein’s mouth opened and his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close enough, for he suddenly turned off the phonograph.
“Now, young man,” he said, putting his arm through mine. “We are ready for Bach!”
As we returned to our seats in the drawing room, the players were tuning up for a new selection. Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee.
“Just allow yourself to listen,” he whispered. “That is all.”
It wasn’t really all, of course. Without the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger I would never have heard, as I did that night for the first time in my life, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire of it. Because I never listen to it alone. I am sitting beside a small, round man with a shock of untidy white hair, a dead pipe clamped between his teeth, and eyes that contain in their extraordinary warmth all the wonder of the world.
When the concert was finished I added my genuine applause to that of the others.
Suddenly our hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein,” she said with an icy glare at me, “that you missed so much of the performance.”
Einstein and I came hastily to our feet. “I am sorry, too,” he said. “My young friend here and I, however, were engaged in the greatest activity of which man is capable.”
She looked puzzled. “Really?” she said. “And what is that?”
Einstein smiled and put his arm across my shoulders. And he uttered ten words that - for at least one person who is in his endless debt - are his epitaph:
“Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”
-- story by Jerome Weidman
via
I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone deaf. Only with great effort can I carry the simplest tune, and serious music was to me no more than an arrangement of noises. So I did what I always did when trapped: I sat down and when the music started I fixed my face in what I hoped was an expression of intelligent appreciation, closed my ears from the inside and submerged myself in my own completely irrelevant thoughts.
After a while, becoming aware that the people around me were applauding, I concluded it was safe to unplug my ears. At once I heard a gentle but surprisingly penetrating voice on my right.
“You are fond of Bach?” the voice said.
I knew as much about Bach as I know about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with the renowned shock of untidy white hair and the ever-present pipe between the teeth. I was sitting next to Albert Einstein.
“Well,” I said uncomfortably, and hesitated. I had been asked a casual question. All I had to do was be I equally casual in my reply. But I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary eyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small.
“I don’t know anything about Bach,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve never heard any of his music.”
A look of perplexed astonishment washed across Einstein’s mobile face.
“You have never heard Bach?”
He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”
A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly, “You will come with me?”
He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it.
Resolutely he led me upstairs. He obviously knew the house well. On the floor above he opened the door into a book-lined study, drew me in and shut the door.
“Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”
“All my life,” I said, feeling awful. “I wish you would go back downstairs and listen, Dr. Einstein. The fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t matter.”
He shook his head and scowled, as though I had introduced an irrelevance.
“Tell me, please,” he said. “Is there any kind of music that you do like?”
“Well,” I answered, “I like songs that have words, and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”
He smiled and nodded, obviously pleased. “You can give me an example, perhaps?”
“Well,” I ventured, “almost anything by Bing Crosby.”
He nodded again, briskly. “Good!”
He went to a corner of the room, opened a phonograph and started pulling out records. I watched him uneasily. At last he beamed. “Ah!” he said.
He put the record on and in a moment the study was filled with the relaxed, lilting strains of Bing Crosby’s “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Einstein beamed at me and kept time with the stem of his pipe. After three or four phrases he stopped the phonograph.
“Now,” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what you have just heard?”
The simplest answer seemed to be to sing the lines. I did just that, trying desperately to stay on tune and keep my voice from cracking. The expression on Einstein’s face was like the sunrise.
“You see!” he cried with delight when I finished. “You do have an ear!”
I mumbled something about this being one of my favorite songs, something I had heard hundreds of times, so that it didn’t really prove anything.
“Nonsense!” said Einstein. “It proves everything! Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in school? Suppose, at your very first contact with numbers, your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem in, say, long division or fractions. Could you have done so?”
“No, of course not.”
“Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipestem. “It would have been impossible and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division and fractions. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division and fractions.”
The pipestem went up and out in another wave.
“But on your first day no teacher would be so foolish. He would start you with elementary things - then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems, he would lead you up to long division and to fractions.”
“So it is with music.” Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record. “This simple, charming little song is like simple addition or subtraction. You have mastered it. Now we go on to something more complicated.”
He found another record and set it going. The golden voice of John McCormack singing “The Trumpeter” filled the room. After a few lines Einstein stopped the record.
“So!” he said. “You will sing that back to me, please?”
I did - with a good deal of self-consciousness but with, for me, a surprising degree of accuracy. Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of my father as he listened to me deliver the valedictory address at my high school graduation.
“Excellent!” Einstein remarked when I finished. “Wonderful! Now this!”
“This” proved to be Caruso in what was to me a completely unrecognizable fragment from “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Nevertheless, I managed to reproduce an approximation of the sounds the famous tenor had made. Einstein beamed his approval.
Caruso was followed by at least a dozen others. I could not shake my feeling of awe over the way this great man, into whose company I had been thrown by chance, was completely preoccupied by what we were doing, as though I were his sole concern.
We came at last to recordings of music without words, which I was instructed to reproduce by humming. When I reached for a high note, Einstein’s mouth opened and his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close enough, for he suddenly turned off the phonograph.
“Now, young man,” he said, putting his arm through mine. “We are ready for Bach!”
As we returned to our seats in the drawing room, the players were tuning up for a new selection. Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee.
“Just allow yourself to listen,” he whispered. “That is all.”
It wasn’t really all, of course. Without the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger I would never have heard, as I did that night for the first time in my life, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire of it. Because I never listen to it alone. I am sitting beside a small, round man with a shock of untidy white hair, a dead pipe clamped between his teeth, and eyes that contain in their extraordinary warmth all the wonder of the world.
When the concert was finished I added my genuine applause to that of the others.
Suddenly our hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein,” she said with an icy glare at me, “that you missed so much of the performance.”
Einstein and I came hastily to our feet. “I am sorry, too,” he said. “My young friend here and I, however, were engaged in the greatest activity of which man is capable.”
She looked puzzled. “Really?” she said. “And what is that?”
Einstein smiled and put his arm across my shoulders. And he uttered ten words that - for at least one person who is in his endless debt - are his epitaph:
“Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”
-- story by Jerome Weidman
via
For Sara...
Photographer Nikki Graziano takes pictures and then creates graphs of mathematical functions which map nicely to elements of the image. It’s a very neat and beautiful way of combining math, nature, and art together into a single image.
Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says.
The value of practice...
Ali, my four year old, is taking drum lessons and doesn't like practicing. Lately I have been extolling the value of practice. I remind her that she needed time to learn to ride her bike well and that before she started practicing regularly she couldn't blow a bubble with bubble gum. She looks at me impatiently and says "Dad, it's too hard." Patience usually wins out and adding as much fun as possible sweetens the deal. Karate class started last week and I bet practicing that will be easier simply because she'll get to kick the old man.
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