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One of the stars of Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address was Jackie Bray, a single mother who was laid off in 2011 and struggled for months to find a good-paying job. Bray's luck finally turned, the president explained, when German industrial giant Siemens hired her at a turbine factory in North Carolina. Though Bray didn't have the skills Siemens wanted, the company partnered with a local community college to train workers like her and even covered their tuition. Before long, Bray was earning a generous wage in a job she loved, operating robotic equipment and lasers. As the president spoke, she sat next to the first lady and beamed.
It was the sort of success that cuts to the heart of Obama's vision of government—activist but not heavy-handed. "I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did," he elaborated. "Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans."
It was also P.R. gold for Siemens, the kind of product placement you couldn't buy if you wanted to. But you can certainly increase your odds. As it happens, Siemens had recently signed up Camille Johnston, the first lady's former communications director, to be its vice president of corporate affairs. For almost two years, few people had a better chance to size up the Obamas, and Johnston put her insights to use prepping her boss at Siemens for a White House meeting. "It was the first foreign company [Obama] mentioned in a State of the Union as far as I could tell," says a former administration official. "It's not like it happens by accident."
Welcome to the buckraking phase of the Obama era. If the campaign was about hope, and the early presidency was about change, increasingly the administration has settled into a kind of normalcy in which it accommodates itself to Washington far more than Washington accommodates itself to Obama. That's not necessarily a bad thing when the result is a bipartisan schmooze-fest at the Jefferson Hotel. But when it comes to the D.C. custom of trading a White House security clearance for a private-sector sinecure, there's a lot to be said for not going native so easily.
Within Obamaworld, there are a few unwritten rules about how to parlay one's experience into a handsome payday. There is, for example, a loose taboo against joining a K Street lobbying shop and explicitly trading on administration connections. And while joining a consulting firm is acceptable, those who do are reluctant to work for clients reviled by liberals: gun makers, tobacco companies, Big Oil, union busters. Above all, there is a simple prohibition against excessive tackiness. "It's like: Don't embarrass yourself. You were part of something special," says a longtime Obama adviser. "I think if [Obama] were to send an all-staff e-mail, it would be along the lines of Ron Burgundy—'Stay classy, San Diego.' "
Alas, not everyone chooses to obey these norms. Take Robert Wolf, a former U.S. chairman of the investment bank UBS and an early Obama fund-raiser, who has served as an all-purpose (and highly visible) "first buddy" throughout the presidency. Last year, Wolf dreamed up the idea for a firm called 32 Advisors, which would instruct clients here and abroad on a variety of business transactions, such as how to secure U.S. government financing for export deals.
The firm opened its doors in February after signing up several prominent Obama alumni, including former White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, who will provide "economic intelligence" as a "strategic partner," and Kevin Varney, the former chief of staff of the government's export-import bank (the very same agency clients will hit up for loans).1 Wolf hopes to keep the roster of companies he works with small and the interactions intimate. "We're very exclusive," he says. "The clients want to be serviced." Goolsbee, for example, hosts a weekly conference call with roughly a dozen hedge funds and private-equity firms to opine on the topic of the day. He occasionally dines with one of the fund managers.
According to Wolf, the president is aware of this new venture and has pronounced himself supportive. "I had the ability to speak with him numerous times about what I'm doing," Wolf says. "He saw my excitement, he was excited." Like other Obamans, Wolf grasps the value of discretion when invoking the president's name. But he is uniquely burdened by a need to talk up his access to power even while trying to downplay it: "Listen, Austan and I, we were his economic advisers during the presidential campaign. The relationship [with Obama] goes way back. Obviously, we're very friendly. We remain close friends." He offers all this as prologue to stipulating that the White House would never lift a finger to help him. "The president has other things to do than worrying about 32 Advisors," he allows.
This is almost certainly true, but a quick glance at Wolf's website suggests the indifference isn't quite mutual. One page features a large picture of Wolf shaking hands with Obama, like a Brooklyn deli owner who knew Dean Martin way back when. There are also prominent photos of Goolsbee, whose face would be recognizable to anyone who followed the Obama campaigns. Though Wolf promises that his firm won't lobby—anyone who asks will be referred to Washington fixer (and strategic partner) Heather Podesta—the text of the website advertises a "broad network of relationships" to help clients "open and sustain the lines of communication with political, business and financial leaders." None of this has gone unnoticed in Obamaworld. "There are those of us who e-mailed it to each other to laugh about it," says a former White House official. "It's stunning."
The irony is that such tackiness is unnecessary. There are more than enough ways to cash in on a White House tour of duty that fall comfortably within the red lines governing Obama's Washington. No one in the West Wing, from the president on down, would begrudge former colleagues the chance to make a buck so long as a modicum of tact is displayed.
The easiest place to accomplish this is at a Washington consulting firm that takes on corporate clients. For example, a group of companies might hire a firm like SKDKnickerbocker—a popular destination among young Obama operatives, run by former White House communications director Anita Dunn—to wage a P.R. campaign for certain tax advantages over their competitors. (The New Republic was an SKDKnickerbocker client.) "Ninety-nine percent of the time it's two big rich companies fighting over something, and you pick a side," says a former administration official now in the consulting world.
Or a client caught in an unfortunate regulatory snag might want to know where to plead its case. "They say, 'Listen, we have a problem with the White House. We think we should talk to Joe Smith,' " says the former official, describing a typical interaction. "I say: 'That guy is a total moron. He's not the person to talk to on this issue.' ... It's giving background advice to people without lobbying."
But it turns out the highest-profile White House grads don't so much join consulting firms these days; they found them. A boldfaced Obama name can rake in upward of $25,000 per month from a client just by dialing into a conference call and drafting a memo from time to time. Four clients means more than a million dollars a year with virtually no overhead. "You can run a business like that on an iPad and a cell phone," says the former administration official. The godfather of this approach is ex-Clinton strategist Doug Sosnik, famous for conducting his business meetings in jeans from coffee shops and hotel lobbies.2 David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter have both adopted the Sosnik model.
The alternative is to rent out office space and staff up, in hopes of one day growing into a consulting powerhouse. This is the Glover Park Group model, based on the firm a group of former Clinton and Gore hands opened in 2001 and nurtured into a 160-person juggernaut. Jim Messina appears to have ambitions in this vein, having procured office space and hired support staff. Former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, who briefly flirted with trying to return to the White House, is in the process of launching a similar firm with Ben LaBolt, the 2012 campaign press secretary.
And then there is Tommy Vietor, who started as a 23-year-old press aide on Obama's 2004 Senate campaign and worked his way up to National Security Council spokesman before leaving the White House in March. Vietor was so far down the bench when he first joined Team Obama that the future president thought he was a volunteer for a few months. (In fact, Vietor was earning a brisk $2,500 per month.) Even as he ascended the ranks—Iowa press secretary, assistant White House press secretary—there was a level of frat-boy goofiness that made him hard to take seriously. During the 2008 general election, Vietor lived in a Chicago group-house known as "the Pad," which became famous around Obama headquarters for its late-night Rock Band sessions. In 2010, he and then–White House speechwriter Jon Favreau made the gossip pages after being photographed shirtless while nursing beers in Georgetown.
Still, there was always something to Vietor that the skeptics missed. He was masochistically hardworking, even a bit bookish. "He reads a ton, wants to learn a ton—not everybody does there," says a former White House colleague. "It's OK to be a bro; it's not a crime." Vietor also excelled at tradecraft. "Every time you talk to a reporter, you're not just trying to move the campaign message. You're trying to extract information," says Pete Giangreco, a longtime Obama adviser. "He was very good at picking things up, being careful about what he gives out." Above all, there was his personal relationship with the Obamas, with whom he spent months on the road during the early years. To this day, the Obama daughters refer to him as "Tommy David Sam," a joking reference to the way Sasha chronically forgot Vietor's name when he first turned up next to their dad.
The upshot of all this is that Vietor should have little trouble landing clients at Fenway Strategies, the firm he recently started with Favreau. "I'm not going to hire Tommy Vietor here," says a former Obama official now at a large corporation. "But a lot of people pay a lot of money in Washington to understand what's going on in the Obama administration since, whatever else you think, they're reasonably insular." It's this insularity that makes people like Vietor so valuable. "Someone who can actually help you think about this administration and this White House is worth something. Don't discount it," the former official says.3
Of course, this being the Obama tribe—a group of people who promised the most ethical, transparent administration in history; who gave themselves migraines by refusing to hire lobbyists (except when they did); who, during the 2008 primaries, held up the influence-peddling ex-Clintonite Lanny Davis as a shorthand for everything wrong with Washington—there is more than a little anguish over all the newfound riches. "Axe [David Axelrod] thinks all of us are lobbyists," says one Obama campaign adviser. In conversations with other Obamans, several were willing to damn former colleagues as ethically suspect. (Naturally, they downplayed their own transgressions.)
The biggest rift separates the aides and advisers close to the campaign masterminds—Axelrod, Gibbs, and Plouffe—and those close to Anita Dunn, the de facto leader of the White House anti-boys-club faction, which also includes Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett. The division dates back to 2008 and 2009, when Axelrod and Gibbs saw Dunn as an internal rival, and it flared up more recently when Dunn described the White House to journalist Ron Suskind as a "hostile workplace to women."
Members of the Axelrod-Gibbs-Plouffe axis chafe at the work Dunn's firm, SKDKnickerbocker, has done for ex–Republican governor Charlie Crist and for a coalition of junk-food manufacturers. "We're very sensitive about not working for anyone that ... might reflect poorly on the president," says one former Obama adviser. "Other firms haven't concerned themselves with that. Anita Dunn and SKDK worked on the sugar campaign in direct competition with the first lady's anti-obesity campaign."
In response, those close to Dunn cry double standard. Plouffe, after all, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars advising corporate clients like Boeing and G.E., and he once gave a speech in Azerbaijan underwritten by a group closely aligned with the country's dictator.4 Gibbs served as a semi-official spokesman for the Obama campaign last year while commanding jaw-dropping speaking fees from corporations no doubt keen to influence the White House. (Gibbs says there's a difference between handicapping the presidential race and "advising groups who oppose the president and first lady's top priorities.") Dunn's defenders also note that she was successful for decades before advising Obama, unlike some of the newly minted "Obama millionaires."
Because of all the angst these exit strategies pose, many aides look longingly at the handful of industries where you can make a small fortune while still passing as virtuous—a kind of holy grail of post-Obama buckraking. Near the top of the list are the tech-consulting firms, like Blue State Digital, that help clients master social media, wage online marketing campaigns, and generally leverage Big Data. "They all say, 'I was the real guy' " behind Obama's new media operation, says a former administration official.
Not far behind are huge tech companies like Twitter and Facebook. (The latter approached Gibbs about helping to oversee its communications in 2011 but never offered him the job.) There's also the entertainment industry, which is "a for-profit corporate space that's a safe area for Democrats," says a former White House staffer. "You can go work for Harvey Weinstein and make all this money." Obama aide Michael Strautmanis recently left to help oversee "corporate citizenship" at Disney, and Jim Gilio, a White House spokesman, now represents talent at a Los Angeles entertainment law firm.
But easily the most protected of protected zones is a newly launched outfit called Organizing for Action (OFA)—essentially the post-election home of the Obama campaign. The idea behind OFA is to build support for the president's legislative agenda using campaign tools like grassroots organizing, polling, and advertising. It is run by Messina and a veteran Obama field operative named Jon Carson, it raises money from Obama donors (except without the annoyance of campaign finance rules), and it houses the extensive databases and e-mail lists the Obama campaign mined to great effect in 2012. Gibbs and Cutter serve on its board, while Plouffe is an adviser.
OFA made a dodgy first impression over the unlimited sums it could raise from deep-pocketed donors, earning itself a scathing New York Times editorial and the annoyance of the president. "There's only one paper the president reads, that's The New York Times," says a former Obama adviser. (Messina has promised to disclose all donors who give $250 or more and reject money from corporations and lobbyists.) Still, OFA raised millions in the first quarter of this year, and it has all the makings of a gravy train, given the money it's likely to spend outsourcing campaign-style business to consultancies, including the firms of its board members.
Earlier this month, I contacted Jim Margolis, one of the president's top ad men, to ask what he made of his former colleagues' career choices. Margolis, who has run his own consulting business for the better part of 30 years, had a paternal and at times world-weary affect while we discussed the firms they were starting and the challenges they would face. Just as the conversation was ending, I offhandedly asked about OFA, and his voiced perked up. Here was a place that could pay top-dollar and wouldn't damage his reputation among Democrats. "Let me say this," he told me excitedly, "I hope we're doing some work for Organizing for Action!"
Another principal at the firm, Barry Johnson, led an Obama White House initiative to gin up foreign investment in this country. He will advise foreign clients interested in acquiring U.S companies and building U.S. facilities, some of which requires government approval.
In an email, Sosnik writes: "When I left the White House I realized that most institutions in this town (law firms, p.r. firms, etc.) were all built on a broken business model which forced people to pay for all kinds of overhead that they did not want or need as part of the fee that they were paying."
Vietor says he and Favreau haven't settled on the precise range of services they'll offer clients but that many clients will have no business with the White House.
Plouffe subsequently donated his fee from the Azerbaijani speech to pro-democracy activists.


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Marketing-wants success in marketing?विपणन-मार्केटिंग में सफलता हासिल करना है?
The baby boom heard 'round the world changed all that. Add the awakening of ethnic and cultural pride, the power of the growing senior market and the onslaught of the Information Age, and you have markets begging to be sharpened down into increasingly microscopic levels. Consequently, marketing in the '90s is becoming akin to taking apart a set of Russian nesting dolls--each shell reveals a smaller piece of the apparently similar constituent. It's no longer good enough to remove the first canister to behold the 50-plus market, or the baby boomer market, or the ethnic market. It's uncovering that tiny doll in the middle that's the key to your success.
Consider that a few years ago, you'd be exalted as cutting-edge if you launched a campaign specifically targeting blacks. Now that's considered pass, even borderline offensive. Marsha Feltingoff, owner of Alma International Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, points out you can no more use the same marketing strategy to reach a black teenager and a black baby boomer than you could to reach a black teen and a white senior citizen.
Consequently, Feltingoff has built her $20 million company on a marketing strategy as diverse as her audience. She markets African jewelry to an adult black market via glossy black packaging, an upscale gold emblem, and an infomercial that combines authentic African music and a message clearly encouraging cultural pride. Meanwhile, Feltingoff appeals to the younger black market through the Internet: Her Web site, which markets information on musical artists, features a nightclub-like atmosphere, bold graphics, and hip cultural and linguistic references.
"I take a very direct approach to [marketing]," says Feltingoff. "I like to peel away the layers of the onion and get to the core of each marketplace I want to reach."
Feltingoff represents a new wave of entrepreneurs who know they must become fluent in niche marketing to stay one step ahead of today's marketing-savvy consumer. "It's much easier to throw jelly beans up in the air and hope they fall in the right place. But that leaves a lot to chance," says Feltingoff, who dabbles in specific market segments via joint ventures or equity investments. "If you take the time to know your market, if you do the homework and build the foundation, you can hone in on that consumer--and your success rate is going to be a lot greater."
Different Folks
"There has been an enormous change in the marketplace," says Ross E. Goldstein, president of Generation Insights, a San Francisco consulting firm that tracks trends. "The consumer marketplace has become so differentiated, it's a misconception to talk about the marketplace in any kind of general, grand way. You have to talk about specific corners of the marketplace. And the imperative for the marketer is to really understand who your consumers are on a number of different levels: what their motivation is, how a particular product or service fits into their lives, what they're looking for, what options are available."
The challenge is to pick a niche, any niche, because "there are a zillion of them," Goldstein says. "You can market to socioeconomic status or to region or to gender or to lifestyle or to technological sophistication. There's no end to the number of different ways you can slice the pie."
To get a feel for just how exact a science marketing has become, consider these statistics:
Female baby boomers influence 80 percent of leisure decisions and conduct 44 percent of business travel.
Vocabulary levels of 18- to 25-year-olds dropped sharply between 1940 and 1980, and continue to steadily decline.
Forty percent of all U.S. Latinos watched the 1995 Super Bowl, while 70 percent watched the 1994 World Cup Final.
About one-third of America's college students don't watch television at all, and 55 percent watch less than 1.5 hours a day.
Black adults aged 24 and younger are three times more likely to buy a pager than the average U.S. adult.
Though obvious in their dissimilarities, these groups are all veterans of the marketing wars. As a result, they display a remarkable discernment about marketing and share an aversion to being lumped together, condescended to or manipulated by businesses.
"Consumers are infinitely wiser about the ways of marketing than they used to be," says Goldstein. "We're talking to a more mature audience, people who know more of what they want and what they're looking for. With the avalanche of information available to consumers, they can scrutinize their purchases more actively than they used to. And they're better able to separate the reality from the fantasy."
New Ages
Imagine an 18-year-old standing next to a 49-year-old. Now show me a marketer who can draw similarities between the two, and I'll show you the laughingstock of his industry. "The [18- to 49-year-old] market doesn't make any sense," says Cheryl Russell, editor of The Boomer Report and editor in chief of New Strategist Publications in Ithaca, New York. "That's just sloppy marketing. Now they've tried to move it up to 25- to 54-year-olds, which is equally silly."
"We're living in a world in which the numbers don't mean what they used to," says Goldstein. "People used to go from one stage to the next, and there was fairly good agreement about the ages at which you do certain things. But what we're seeing now is no longer linear--it's circular. People repeat stages and recycle their lives, so you have people raising a family, getting divorced, and then raising another family. You can have two men who are 64 years old, and one is retired and driving around the country in his Winnebago, while the other one is just remarried with a toddler in the house."
Lowering The Boomer
Yet, while the markets continue to divide like some out-of-control amoeba, the business world has been slow to grasp the new reality of marketing. Part of the problem is this: Instead of rushing to pick up on the transition in marketing, businesses have been lulled into a mindless game of "follow the boomer."
"The baby boomers have driven everything in marketing since the end of World War II, and every company that has gotten a little out front in terms of anticipating what the boomers are going to buy has prospered enormously," says Geoffrey Meredith, founder and president of Lifestage Matrix Marketing, a strategic planning, consulting and marketing communications company in Lafayette, California.
"The baby boom fooled many people into believing that young adults were a force in the marketplace," says Russell. "And for most people in business today, that's all they've known. They don't understand things have changed. They keep chasing after the younger market, hoping to replay the past, waiting for the new group of young people to change everything the way the boomers did. [But] it's only when the boomers started to move beyond the young adult age that the whole idea of generational marketing emerged."
Generational marketing, which defines consumers not just by age but by social, economic, demographic and psychological factors, can be traced back to about 1980. And though it has yet to be fully tapped, it's already becoming dated as we move on to the next twist: cohort marketing (see "A Closer Look"), which Meredith defines as the study of "people who underwent [the same] experiences during their formative years, forming a bond that leads them to behave differently from others, even when [those] others are closer in age."
The cohort construct, developed in the political science arena in the 1940s to determine people's voting patterns and popularized in sociology during the late 1950s, has until now "been almost entirely ignored as a marketing tool," Meredith says. Unlike generations, which are formed according to birth dates and usually span about 20 or 25 years, cohorts vary in length depending on the historic events that define them. Preferences in music, food and apparel, as well as attitudes toward money and sexuality, are often dictated by what was popular during the cohort's coming-of-age period.
To tread an even narrower path, Meredith considers not only cohorts but also other factors such as life stages, or what people are doing at a particular time in their life (getting married, buying a home, retiring); and physiographics, or physical conditions related to age (menopause, nearsightedness or farsightedness, arthritis). By targeting according to these cohorts, "and talking to markets through subliminal cues that are cohort-related, you can achieve extraordinary responses," Meredith says.
Subtlety is the key, now that most of these cohorts have been hammered with marketing manipulation for years. Meredith points to an effort by Johnson & Johnson to market Affinity shampoo for "over-40 hair," as well as the campaign promoting Campbell's Senior Singles as the "soup for one." Both of these efforts "failed miserably," Meredith says.
On the other hand, Meredith notes the success of a Nabisco Oreo commercial that, to appeal to older adults, chose respected actors from that age group who danced to a tune that was popular in the 1940s. "That way, you target 65-year-olds without explicitly saying, `Hey, 65-year-olds, buy this!' " Meredith says. "If you play big band or swing music, they'll respond."
You can't realistically address marketing without taking into account the boomer market, and you have to also consider that 4 million of them are going to be 50 this year. But whatever you do, don't mention the term "senior market" to them.
"There are very few businesses that are attuned to the generational opportunities because they're assuming the boomers are going to be like their parents were," says Russell. "And that's a big mistake because boomer lifestyles and attitudes are very different. They created the youth market 30 years ago, and they're still the youth market now that they're in their 40s and 50s. They're just as hedonistic, impulsive and self-centered as they've always been."
"Boomers like rock 'n' roll," Meredith says. "They liked it when they were 18, they like it now that they're 50, and they will like the Rolling Stones when they're 75."
Actually, boomers are "dead set against being anything like their parents," says Phil Goodman, founder of the Boomer Marketing & Research Center in San Diego and author of The Boomer Marketing Revolution (Boomer Marketing & Research Center). "They've taken that theme with them throughout all their life cycles, and they're not going to change when they're 50. If you're dealing with a 50-year-old boomer, you're dealing with a person who doesn't see himself as 50 years old."
So, in response to the hoopla over the boomers turning 50, Goodman spouts, "Who cares? People are waiting for boomers to change. They can wait until hell freezes over--boomers are never going to change. Fifty-year-olds today don't resemble 50-year-olds from 10 to 15 years ago. And if they don't resemble them, if they don't act like them, why would you market to them that way?"
Cultural Awareness
Another segment that cannot be ignored is the ethnic consumer. With 25 percent of the population either black, Latino or Asian, ethnic Americans represent close to $600 billion in gross income. Amy Hilliard-Jones, the founder of Chicago multi cultural marketing firm Hilliard-Jones Marketing Group, calls the market "unmined gold."
"The income they represent is well above the income potential of certain countries in the world, including Canada," Hilliard-Jones says. "And yet many U.S. businesses have a strategic plan to invest in other countries [but are ignoring] the significant potential right here within the borders of this country."
Like consumers overseas, ethnic American consumers must often endure the brunt of inane marketing efforts. According to Hilliard-Jones, companies often think it sufficient to just change the faces in a marketing campaign or to place a few ethnic consumers in the backgrounds of ads--"as part of the party," she adds, "but not the host."
Another common mistake is to generalize ethnicities--focusing on, say, Asians, rather than individually addressing the different orientations of Chinese-, Japanese- and Korean-American consumers. To avoid such issues, marketers are called upon to "use a lot of strategic analysis and cultural sensitivity when approaching a multicultural market," Hilliard-Jones says. "They can't make assumptions but must take the time to build a base of cultural awareness."
That doesn't mean relying on stereotypical nuances, such as slang or overtly ethnic overtures. "You don't have to do that to show you understand different ethnicities," says Hilliard-Jones. "What people want is to be recognized that they exist, treated relevantly, and respected for their culture and the heritage that their culture represents to them."
No Mass Appeal
The realm of niche marketing is--by now, you've probably guessed it--a wild ride. Perhaps that's the reason it's taken small businesses so long to catch on. Actually, niche marketing "can be somewhat complicated and costly but no more so than other [types of] marketing," says Meredith. "The payoff, however, is that the marketing results are much more targeted and effective. So small-business owners, to the extent they can apply these techniques and find a niche, can really go after a market and own it rather than having to compete with everyone else."
The Internet should help niche marketing mature, making the concept more accessible for small-business owners as well as consumers. "The Internet eventually will be a vehicle that can reach the masses and yet at the same time target very specific niches," says Russell. "It will provide customized, individual, one-on-one, interactive marketing."
And, when you strip away all the current methodologies, niche marketing really becomes as simple, as low-tech as being able to communicate one on one. "Address consumers naturally, as you would in a personal conversation," says Goodman. "The only way to market to people is to market to one individual rather than to a group. Just create your marketing as if you're talking to John or Jane Doe sitting across the table from you."
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Sunshine HomesThe BEST customer service of any place around! I had such a hard time trying to get my house, being that I was so young and just starting out. I went to every home retailer around… Statesboro, Dublin, Jesup, Reidsville, and more. When I walked into Yess Home Center, I was immediately treated like family. Even better, I had my house — exactly how I wanted it — in no time! I've had my home for a year now and anytime I have ever called with any questions or concerns, they were immediately answered. They were at my house the same day if I had any problems! Truly great people to work with on getting your dream home.
Tiffany Fowler


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The last time I was desperate for a new "inside" activity, Pinterest and a few hundred other Mommy Bloggers suggested I pour a little washable paint into plastic baggies and tape them to my sliding glass door. The novelty of that activity lasted less than the break between Curious George episodes (you know the one I'm talking about- where the "real kids" come on and C loses all interest in whatever they're trying to teach him).
But thanks to that activity, I did have these paints stockpiled on hand for another rainy day, begging to be used.
And that's when I truly lost my mind and decided to let C paint the bathtub. Mind you, I didn't say "paint in the bathtub," I said "paint the bathtub." And that's exactly what he did.
Thankfully the mess was relatively confined to a very washable space and all was going swimmingly until C decided he was sick and tired of painting the walls and the tub and wanted to move onto bigger and better things like his mother and the toilet.
Hosing him down was easy-peasy but hosing down the walls and the tub and the grout was no easy feat.
But was it worth it? Absolutely. He had a blast.
Will we be doing it again soon? No thank you. I think this activity is quickly being added to the "Things I Like To Do With Daddy" list.
Don't confuse "cool mom" with "crazy mom," dear Loyals. This was definitely one of my "where the hell did I leave my sanity" moments! ;)


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Picked this up at an estate auction recently. Can't wait to put it to work!
Finally! Working on the truck again!
While I wasn't planning on cutting into the cab last night, when I got into the shop – I decided that it was time to tear into the body work. I was apprehensive at first, I didn't want to make a bigger mess of a pretty decent cab. But once I got into it, it wasn't so bad! Take a look at the cowl removal.
Shop setup
Since we moved in November I've slowly been getting my new shop setup. I never thought I would be packing up and moving when I started the truck rebuild, but soon I'll start reaping the benefits!
I now have hard air lines installed with filter and drain, and the bench is becoming usable! Within a few weeks I hope to start metal work on the truck ca
I've got gas!
I finally made the switch from flux core to argon/co2 shielding gas, and what a difference! Much cleaner welds with less cleanup. When I bought the welder two years ago I wasn't in a rush to buy the gas, I wanted to spread the financial pain around! Now that I'm ready to tackle patch panels on the body, I'm ready to step up the welding! Hopefully the upcoming weeks will see work resuming on the chevy!


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Original Equipment (OE) Number
OE Number - Original Equipment Number- the number of complete component or sub-assembly which is used during production of the vehicles and marketed under car manufacturer´s brand name. OE Number is interchangeable with the term Genuine Number.
Genuine part is refers to OE part in the vehicle manufacturers packaging. The Genuine part and OE part are equivalent, as described above.
OE Numbers on our website are given for reference purposes only. It helps you to find alternative products from producers on Aftemarket. The Aftermarket provides a wide variety of parts of varying qualities and prices for nearly all vehicle makes and models. It is necessary to take into consideration that part from Aftemarket meets OE tehnical specifications, but not always a qulaity of materials used during production.
Some producers widely represented and known on Aftermarket are also OE manufacturers (for example: Bosch, Denso, Delphi, TRW, Lemförder, Continental, ATE, SKF, INA)


text:
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joan Rivers, the raucous, acid-tongued comedian who crashed the male-dominated realm of late-night talk shows and turned Hollywood red carpets into danger zones for badly dressed celebrities, died Thursday. She was 81.
Rivers died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, surrounded by family and close friends, daughter Melissa Rivers said. She was hospitalized Aug. 28 after going into cardiac arrest in a doctor's office following a routine procedure. The New York state health department is investigating the circumstances.
"My mother's greatest joy in life was to make people laugh," Melissa Rivers said. "Although that is difficult to do right now, I know her final wish would be that we return to laughing soon."
Upon hearing of her death, reaction poured out from dozens of notables, ranging from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Rivers' peer-in-comedy Don Rickles.
"Knowing her, working with her and enjoying the fun times of life with her was special. She will always be in our hearts," Rickles said in a statement.
Under the immobile, plastic surgery-crafted veneer that became Joan Rivers' unapologetic trademark as she aged, her wit remained as vibrantly raw and unruly as when she first broke her way into a comedy world belonging largely to men.
In a 2010 "Late Show" interview, David Letterman broached the plastic surgery issue: "You don't look exactly like the Joan Rivers I used to know." Rivers didn't flinch.
"Our business is so youthful. ... You do little tweaks, and I think if a woman wants to look good, or a man, do it," she said. "It's not about anybody else."
Fashion and acting were the early dreams of the woman who grew up as a self-described "fatty," but it was humor that paid the bills and ultimately made Rivers a star. She refused to cede the spotlight as the decades passed, working vigorously until her death.
"I have never wanted to be a day less than I am," she said in a 2013 interview with The Associated Press. "People say, 'I wish I were 30 again.' Nahhh! I'm very happy HERE. It's great. It gets better and better. And then, of course, we die," she quipped.
Rivers was a scrapper, rebuilding her career and life after a failed attempt to make it as a late-night host was followed closely by her husband's suicide.
Rivers' style was hard-driving from the start and her material only got sharper. She was ready to slam anyone. A favored target was Elizabeth Taylor's weight ("her favorite food is seconds"), but the comedian kept current with verbal assaults on Miley Cyrus and other newcomers.
With her raspy voice and brash New York accent, Rivers turned the red carpet of the Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes into a stalking ground for E! Entertainment, where she first began working in 1994. Her familiar query — "Who are you wearing?" — would quickly give way to such snarky commentary as her assessment of Adele's Grammy outfit: The singer looked like she was sitting on a teapot.
The barbs could turn inward as well, with Rivers mocking everything from her proclaimed lack of sex appeal ("my best birth control now is just to leave the lights on") to her own mortality.
In 2007, Rivers and her partner-in-slime, daughter Melissa, were dropped by their new employer, the TV Guide Channel, and replaced by actress Lisa Rinna. But the Rivers' women returned to E! and found new success with "Fashion Police," which Rivers hosted and her daughter produced.
Joan Rivers never relaxed, always looking for the next and better punchline.
"The trouble with me is, I make jokes too often," she told the AP in 2013, just days after the death of her older sister. "I was making jokes yesterday at the funeral home. That's how I get through life. Life is SO difficult — everybody's been through something! But you laugh at it, it becomes smaller."
She had faced true crisis in the mid-1980s. Edgar Rosenberg, her husband of 23 years, committed suicide in 1987 after she was fired from her Fox talk show, which he produced. The show's failure was a major factor, Rivers said. Rosenberg's suicide also temporarily derailed her career.
"Nobody wants to see someone whose husband has killed himself do comedy four weeks later," she told The New York Times in 1990.
Rivers had originally entered show business with the dream of being an actress, but comedy was a way to pay the bills while she auditioned for dramatic roles. "Somebody said, 'You can make six dollars standing up in a club,'" she told the AP, "and I said, 'Here I go!' It was better than typing all day."
In the early 1960s, comedy was a man's game and the only women comics she could look to were Totie Fields and Phyllis Diller. But she worked her way up from local clubs in New York until, in 1965, she landed her big break on "The Tonight Show" after numerous rejections. "God, you're funny. You're going to be a star," host Johnny Carson told her after she had rocked the audience with laughter.
Her nightclub career prospered and by late that year she had recorded her first comedy album, "Joan Rivers Presents Mr. Phyllis and Other Funny Stories." Her personal life picked up as well: She met British producer Rosenberg and they married after a four-day courtship.
Rivers hosted a morning talk show on NBC in 1968 and, the next year, made her Las Vegas debut with female comedians still a relative rarity.
"To control an audience is a very masculine thing," Rivers told the Los Angeles Times in 1977. "The minute a lady is in any form of power, they (the public) totally strip away your femininity — which isn't so. Catherine the Great had a great time."
In 1978, she wrote, directed and co-starred in the movie "Rabbit Test." It had an intriguing premise — Billy Crystal as a man who gets pregnant — but was poorly received. In 1983, though, she scored a coup when she was named permanent guest host for Carson on "Tonight."
Although she drew good ratings, NBC hesitated in renewing her contract three years later. Fledgling network Fox jumped in with an offer of her own late-night show.
She launched "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers" on Fox in 1986, but the venture lasted just a season and came at a heavy price: Carson cut ties with her when she surprised him by becoming a competitor.
Carson kept publicly silent about her defection but referred obliquely to his new rival in his monologue on the day her show debuted.
"There are a lot of big confrontations this week," Carson said as the audience giggled expectantly. "Reagan and Gorbachev, the Mets versus the Astros, and me versus 'The Honeymooners' lost episodes."
Her show was gone in a year and she would declare that she had been "raped" by Fox; three months later, her husband was found dead.
It took two years to get her career going again, and then she didn't stop. Rivers appeared at clubs and on TV shows including "Hollywood Squares." She appeared on Broadway and released more comedy albums and books, most recently "Diary of a Mad Diva."
She was born Joan Molinsky in Brooklyn to Russian immigrants Meyer Molinsky, a doctor, and Beatrice. Rivers had a privileged upbringing but struggled with weight — she was a self-proclaimed "fatty" as a child — and recalled using make-believe as an escape. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1954, she went to work as a department store fashion coordinator before she turned to comedy clubs. She had a six-month marriage to Jimmy Sanger.
In recent years, Rivers was a familiar face on TV shopping channel QVC, hawking her line of jewelry, and won the reality show "Celebrity Apprentice" by beating out her bitter adversary, poker champ Annie Duke. In 2010, she was featured in the documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work."
She never let age, or anything, make her sentimental. Earlier in 2014, she got inked: a half-inch-tall tattoo, "6M," on the inside of her arm representing 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust. In 2013, she brashly pledged to work "forever."
"You never relax and say, 'Well, here I am!'" she declared. "You always think, 'Is this gonna be OK?' I have never taken anything for granted."
Survivors include her daughter, Melissa and a grandson, Cooper.
Comedian Joan Rivers dies


text: Greetings from Friends of the Arcata Marsh. FOAM is a small nonprofit organization based in the coastal California city of Arcata, about 275 miles north of San Francisco. We were founded in 1989 with the initial task of raising funds to build an interpretive center at the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, but since then have been responsible for educating the public about the Arcata Marsh. We rely on dedicated volunteers to accomplish our community outreach.


text:
When NASA's Stardust spacecraft flew by Comet Wild 2, the probe saw
something that surprised astronomers.
January 16, 2004: On Jan. 2nd, 2004, NASA's Stardust spacecraft approached
Comet Wild 2 and flew into a storm. Flurries of comet dust pelted the craft.
At least half a dozen grains moving faster than bullets penetrated
Stardust's outermost defenses. The craft's 16 rocket engines struggled to
maintain course while a collector, about the size of a tennis racquet,
caught some of the dust for return to Earth two years hence.
All that was expected.
Then came the surprise. It happened when Stardust passed by the core of the
comet, only 236 km distant, and photographed it using a navigation camera.
The images were intended primarily to keep the spacecraft on course. They
also revealed a worldlet of startling beauty.
At the heart of every comet lies a "dirty snowball," a compact nucleus of
dust and ice that the sun vaporizes, little by little, to form the comet's
spectacular tail. These nuclei are hard to see. For one thing, most are
blacker than charcoal; they reflect precious little sunlight for cameras.
Plus they're hidden deep inside a cloud of vaporizing gas and dust, called
"the coma." Stardust's plunge into Wild 2's coma allowed it to view the
nucleus at close range.
Previous flybys of Comet Halley by the European Giotto probe and Comet
Borrelly by NASA's Deep Space 1 revealed lumpy cores without much
interesting terrain–as expected. These comets have been sun-warmed for many
thousands of years. Solar heating has melted away their sharpest features.
Comet Wild 2, however, looks different. "We were amazed by the feature-rich
surface of the comet," says Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington,
the mission's principal investigator. "It is highly complex. There are
barn-sized boulders, 100-meter high cliffs, and some weird terrain unlike
anything we've ever seen before. There are also some circular features," he
adds, "that look like impact craters as large as 1 km across."
"The high cliffs tell us that the crust of the comet is reasonably strong,"
notes Brownlee. It's probably a mixture of fine-grained rocky material held
together by frozen water, carbon monoxide and methanol. Certainly a lander
could touch down there, or an astronaut could walk across the surface
without worrying too much about the ground collapsing.
An astronaut standing on Comet Wild 2 would see a truly fantastic landscape,
speculates Brownlee. "I imagine them inside one of the craters, surrounded
by deep cliffs." Icy spires, as tall as a person, might rise out of the
crater floor. "These would be be the comet-equivalent of 'snow spikes' on
Earth–those little jagged ridges that form when snow is exposed to sunlight
and melts."
Getting out of the crater would be easy. "Just jump," says Brownlee, "but
not too hard." The comet's gravity is only 0.0001-g, so "you could easily
leap into orbit."
Some of the photos from Stardust reveal gaseous jets. "The jets come from
active regions on the comet's surface, fissures or vents probably, where the
ice is vaporizing and rushing into space," Brownlee says. This is how mass
is transferred from the comet's nucleus to its tail.
Viewed from the surface, the jets would be nearly transparent. But an
astronaut could spot them by looking for "dust entrained with the gas. Dust
grains glinting in the sunlight would look like tracer bullets shooting out
of the ground."
A careful explorer could survey the entire 5-km nucleus in only a few hours,
leaping high above the surface, dodging the occasional jet. "What an
experience that would be," he says.
There are billions of comets in the solar system. "We've gotten a close-up
look at only three," says Brownlee. And one of the three, Comet Halley,
presented its night side to the cameras. So it's too soon to say whether
Comet Wild 2, among comets, is truly unusual.
Unlike comets Halley and Borrelly, notes Brownlee, "Wild 2 is a very recent
arrival to the inner solar system." For billions of years it orbited in the
cold deep space beyond Jupiter, until 1974 when it was nudged by Jupiter's
gravity into a sun-approaching orbit. Since then the comet has passed by the
Sun only five times; solar heating is only beginning to mold its surface.
And, according to Brownlee, that might be the key to the comet's appearance.
"Wild 2's surface is a mixture of young and old that we haven't see before,"
he explains. Young features include possible sinkholes collapsing as the
terrain is warmed. Impact craters and their ejecta, on the other hand, are
old scars from time spent in the outer solar system.
The old parts of Wild 2 are what make the comet an attractive target for the
Stardust probe, which captured a thousand or more grains of comet dust
during the flyby. Such material, little altered since the formation of the
solar system, could tell us a great deal about our origins.
The craft's payload will return to Earth in 2006 for analysis by scientists.
If a single picture from the navigation camera can surprise researchers,
just imagine what's in store when they get their hands on a thousand pieces
of the comet itself.


text:
When massive floods struck the Indus River Basin in July 2010, it was Pakistan's worst natural disaster in memory.
A heavy monsoon period caused the Indus to overflow, until nearly one-fifth of the country was under water. The monsoons claimed 1,700 lives and 14 million were forced to flee their homes.
With entry into the country difficult for volunteers from other nations, Pakistani Volunteer Disaster Relief mobilized from within to deliver aid in various regions—Islamabad in the north, Karachi in the south and Kushab in the central region. With most roads flooded and impassable, the teams first rescued families stranded in remote encampments. Volunteers reached them with local boats and waded through chest-high water to deliver supplies. They brought food, water, clothing and emergency supplies, and provided Assists to the shocked and traumatized.
In yet another area, Volunteer Disaster Relief teamed up with a Pakistani army unit. They distributed food, water and medicine to thousands living in remote refugee camps, teaching their leaders basic Assist principles and organizing the camps to avert rioting by the desperate people. The team delivered thousands of Assists and trained more than 1,800 others to do the same.
An official of the Sindh Government Ministry of Law stated: "I really agree with and am inspired by the motto of the Disaster Relief Team, and they have proved these words by their actions: 'Something can be done about it.' It is great to know and see that these volunteers are so effectively helping the flood victims. Our country needs this honesty and dedication. I really appreciate their humanitarian work. Thank you so much."
An official from the Sindh High Court wrote: "Flood victims really need someone who can listen to them and their problems and the Disaster Relief Team is doing that. This is appreciated."


text:
Besides being the best songwriter the worlds ever seen, Bob Dylan is also a master interpreter of other people´s songs.
Here are some covers of Beatles, The Rolling Stones & Neil Young.
The Beatles
Something (George Harrison)
Echo Arena
Liverpool, England
1 May 2009
- Bob Dylan (vocal & keyboard)
- Stu Kimball (guitar)
- Denny Freeman (guitar)
- Donnie Herron (violin, mandolin, steel guitar)
- Tony Garnier (bass)
- George Recile (drums & percussion)
Continue reading Bob Dylan Covers The Beatles, The Rolling Stones & Neil Young (Videos & Audio)


text:
Now showing items 1-1 of 1
Preschool sibling interaction in separated and married families: Are same-sex pairs or older sisters more sociable?
(Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, 1998)
Two factors have been associated with the quality of sibling relationships: the sex of the children and their family circumstances. Yet the data on each issue are complex. This study examines the sex constellations of ...


text:
In tune with the egregores
Egregore is an overused word, often in the wrong context. And it is usually miscomprehended, which leads to us being influenced by egregores without really understanding why - and in this sense, not knowing this influence or even not believing in it won't make any difference. Jumping from a building while not believing in gravity won't make you float safely to the ground.
Very well. So, what is an egregore?
- Read more about In tune with the egregores
- 3 comments
- Log in or register to post comments


text:
This section contains information about the state of New Zealand's environment and the work we do using science and data.
Actions you can take as part of making our environment in Aotearoa flourish.
The role of central government and the work we are doing to reduce our impact on the environment.
Incorporating te ao Māori into our work is valuable to all of Aotearoa. We acknowledge the role of tangata whenua to help create a flourishing environment for every generation.
Find out about Acts, national policy statements, national environmental standards and other regulations we administer.
Hear from our people about what it is like to work at MfE.
Last updated: 22 May 2023


text:
Below are the updates added to IGP Archives in the last two weeks of July:
GENERAL IRELAND Genealogy Archives - Emigration
"American" 9 Apr 1803 - to New York
"Mohawk" 23 Apr 1803 - Going to Philadelphia
"Ardent" 23 Apr 1803
DUBLIN Genealogy Archives
Memorial Cards – Kelly & Kennedy
Cemetery – Christ Church Memorials V. VII, pg 298-310
FERMANAGH Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Tempo Church of Ireland Cemetery (Armstrong, Forde, McCollum)
Rossory Parish Church Cemetery (Armstrong et al)
GALWAY Genealogy Archives – Headstones
Tuam, St Mary's (CoI) Cathedral - 2 (Baron Oranmore & Browne)
MEATH Genealogy Archives – Headstones
Navan; Ardmulchan Church Cemetery
ROSCOMMON Genealogy Archives – Land
Canceled Books, Kilteevan E.D. ca. 1911-1920's
(Cloonlarge, Cloonmore & Cloonmurly townlands)
TIPPERARY Genealogy Archives – Headstones
Clonmel; St. Patrick's Cemetery - (DROHAN)
WICKLOW Genealogy Archives – Headstone Index
Blessington; St. Mary's, Part 2
Curtlestown; St. Patricks Church Cemetery (more to come)


text:
Monsoon Brands Limited is the owner of this Website and responsible for any personal data (as that term is defined in the Data Protection Act 2018) you submit via the Website. We are notified with the UK Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZA762294, and are regulated by the ICO. If you have any complaints about our security or handling of your personal which we haven't been able to resolve with you, you can contact the ICO at www.ico.org.uk.
When you shop with us we'll ask you for certain information (such as your email address, name, address, and where you purchase a product, your payment details) to make sure that your order and delivery go smoothly. Any information you hand over reaches us fully encrypted through an SSL – a special security layer added to your account and checkout pages. You can see when you're on a secure page, because the address in your browser will begin with https instead of http. And you can sleep easy, because your credit card details are processed in the UK.
You can register with Visa and Mastercard Securecode through your card issuing bank. It will bring up an extra security window after you check out that requires you to input digits from a pass code that you'll have set with your bank.
When you choose to pay with Paypal, your financial information isn't even shared with us.
Remember to keep your account password safe! We can help you to reset it now and then, but you'll need to make sure that it stays with you and only you. Giving it out can represent a security risk and Monsoon Accessorize will not be liable for any loss or damage that might arise from this.
When you input your information into the website, we store it securely and might use it for:
Except as listed above, or to our other group companies who are involved in processing orders/administrative support, we don't share your information with any third parties except our suppliers or processors who we've checked out first and who we appoint to work with us to provide services to you. These suppliers include the teams delivering products to you and our marketing agencies.
We only keep your information as long as we need to, for the purposes listed above. When we don't need it any more we delete it securely. Please note if you ask us to stop processing your information for marketing purposes, we may need to actually retain some of it to ensure your details are kept on our marketing suppression lists.
If you'd like to: Know what information we hold about you, ask a question about our security and processing of your information or have us delete the data we hold about you – please contact our Customer Service team, who will be happy to help.
Most websites use cookies, and we do too, to keep offering you the best service. A cookie is way of transferring little bits of information from our website back to us, which means, for example, that we can see which pages or products are our most popular and then create a better experience for you in future.
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These simply enable you to browse our website and use all our functions, like your Shopping Bag or Account pages.
These help us to understand how our customers are using our website, and we use this information to constantly improve the way we do things.
These help us to make sure your online experience is simple, easy and relevant to you.
We sometimes run online advertising campaigns, and, if we think you'll be interested in what we have to say, targeting cookies will help us to deliver that message to you. More importantly, they limit the amount of times you see any of our ads.
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It may be that there's a firewall blocking your access to secure pages. Some businesses or networks use firewalls to moderate the content employees or users can see. Try contacting your IT team to request access.
On most credit and debit cards, this code is found on the reverse of your card. Take the last three digits of the number on your signature strip – that should be it. On American Express cards, look for a four-digit number on the front.
If you're having issues with your password for this, you'll need to contact your card-issuing bank. We don't have access to any of your account information for Visa and Mastercard Securecode.


text:
Foursquare users have put a lot of energy into leaving tips and raves about locations on the geo-aware social app, but that doesn't help if you're not a member. FourWhere publicizes and organizes Foursquare's venues, "yelps" and tips/reviews for everybody's benefit.
FourWhere is really handy and a breeze to get started with—with one small catch. Search for the city you're exploring in the upper-right bar and confirm the location. Then you'll see, well, nothing. Right-click somewhere in the map that pops up, though, and you can choose to see all nearby venues that Foursquare users have checked into, only places with reviews/comments, or clear your map and start over in another area. Mouse over a blip on the map, and the user and comment that created it are instantly highlighted in the right-hand column.
If Foursquare users are going to spend all that time on their smartphones, getting all righteous about the absolute best cannoli in town, everybody should benefit, right? FourWhere is free to use, no Foursquare membership required.
FourWhere [via TechCrunch]


text:
gmDemocratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently gave an impassioned pitch for her "Green New Deal" on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. After stating that her opponents were misrepresenting the legislation, she read the full text of it into the Congressional Record and claimed that the reason it is "so, so controversial" is "because for years we have prioritized the pursuit of profit at any and all human and environmental cost."
That statement, along with the actual text of her bill, are at odds with numerous facts about pollution, regulations, and the economics of energy.
Environmental Trends
Contrary to AOC's allegation that the U.S. doesn't prioritize the environment, the nation's air has become significantly cleaner over the past 40 years. Under federal law, the EPA monitors the outdoor concentrations of six major "criteria pollutants" that are widespread and likely "to endanger public health or welfare." According to the latest and earliest primary measures of these pollutants, the average U.S. outdoor levels of:
- carbon monoxide declined by 84% from 1980 through 2017.
- ozone declined by 32% from 1980 through 2017.
- lead declined by 99% from 1980 through 2017.
- nitrogen dioxide declined by 60% from 1980 through 2017.
- 10 micron particulate matter declined by 34% from 1990 through 2017.
- 2.5 micron particulate matter declined by 41% from 2000 through 2017.
- sulfur dioxide decreased by 90% from 1980 through 2017.
Beyond criteria pollutants, the EPA estimates the emissions of 187 hazardous air pollutants, which are those that present "a threat of adverse human health effects" like cancer and birth defects. Combined emissions of these substances have declined by about 50% since the earliest available data, which stretches back to the 1990s.
Outdoor hazardous air pollutant levels have become so minimal that the EPA estimates they increase the average risk of cancer over a 70-year-lifetime by 0.004 percentage points. For comparison, the average lifetime risk of developing cancer is 38% for women and 40% for men.
Yet in accord with misinformation spread by politicians, educators, journalists, fact checkers, and environmental activists, 41% of voters believe that the air in the United States is now more polluted than it was in the 1980s. This includes 52% of people who plan to vote for a Democratic president in November and 28% of people who plan to vote for Trump.
Also contradicting AOC, the U.S. has been enacting reams of energy-related environmental laws and regulations for decades. As the U.S. Department of Energy reported in 1992, "the effort to deal with environmental concerns has become a central feature of federal energy policy," and "there are so many government regulations concerning energy that it is difficult to identify and analyze all of them."
Since then, the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, along with Congress, have added considerably to these laws and regulations. For one of countless examples of how they have manifested, a 2012 Government Accountability Office report "identified 679 renewable energy-related initiatives" in the federal government. For another example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported in 2010 that regulatory costs for hydropower "have increased six times over the past thirty years."
Another delusive aspect of AOC's statement is her finger-pointing at "the pursuit of profit." In reality, ordinary people—not corporations—are the main beneficiaries of the low-cost, abundant energy that characterizes the U.S. energy market. As explained in the textbook Introduction to Air Pollution Science, "The availability of affordable electric power is essential for public health and economic prosperity." A diverse array of other scholarly publications make the same basic point, noting that high energy prices drive up hunger, drive down wages, stoke unemployment, and harm people in a wide variety of other ways.
A simple fact of economics is that consumers "prefer a lower price and sellers prefer a higher price." Yet, regulations and subsidies like those required to implement the Green New Deal raise energy costs. This harms consumers while increasing the revenues of corporations. Such policies have already guaranteed corporations double-digit profits on certain energy projects and supplied them with funds for executive bonuses.
In Germany, where government is more aggressive than the U.S. in forcing the use of renewable energy, the average price of household electricity is about three times that of the United States. Yet, Germany is still nowhere close to the Green New Deal's mandate of "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources." In 2018, wind and solar provided 24% of the Germany's electricity, compared to 9% in the United States. Those percentages are not for the nations' total energy—just their electricity.
The costs of getting to AOC's 100% figure would be multiplicatively greater than the three-fold premium paid by German households. This is because when wind and solar generation increase, so do the costs of backing them up for the inevitable times when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Per the Institute for Plasma Physics in the Netherlands:
If the share of wind and solar power grow, great care has to be taken to guarantee the stability of the electricity supply. In most cases, back-up systems fueled by fossil fuels will be necessary.
[W]ind and solar energy are so-called intermittent sources of energy, meaning that they do not deliver energy all the time. This means that you need back-up power, or a means of storing power for times when there is no sun or wind, which adds to the costs of these energy sources.
Zero Emissions Fantasy
The Green New Deal also demands the use of imaginary products, as there is no such thing as the "zero-emission energy sources" that it requires. Though solar and wind create no pollution while they are in use, that is not true of their manufacturing and disposal. As detailed in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, "all" manmade "means of generating energy, including solar electric, create pollutants when their entire life cycle is taken into account. Life-cycle emissions result from using fossil-fuel-based energy to produce the materials for solar cells, modules, and systems, as well as directly from smelting, production, and manufacturing facilities."
Wind and solar create far less pollutants than fossil fuels, but their environmental benefits are mitigated by the fact their high costs drive people to burn more wood and other fuels in fires and home stoves. These don't burn fuel as efficiently as commercial energy technologies, and hence, they produce elevated levels of outdoor and indoor pollutants. The added consumption of wood also causes deforestation. Hence, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported in 2013:
- "With energy costs escalating, more Germans are turning to wood burning stoves for heat."
- "The number of Germans buying heating devices that burn wood and coal has grown steadily since 2005," which has "boosted prices for wood, leading many to fuel their fires with theft."
- "About 10 percent of the firewood that comes out of Brandenburg's forest every year is stolen…."
While ignoring the harmful effects that high energy prices inflict on the vast majority of people, the Green New Deal promises to "create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States." In truth, "green job" policies mainly benefit corporations, not workers. As documented in the book Environmental and Natural Resource Economics: An Encyclopedia, "Growth in the green jobs sector does not necessarily imply net job creation" or economic progress for the following reasons:
- It is "easy to promote job growth in a given activity by simply encouraging (subsidizing) inefficient technologies that are more costly. We could, for example, use picks and shovels to dig for oil," but this would reduce the nation's productivity, which is the primary driver of people's living standards.
- "The end product of a solar array or a wind farm is" electricity output. "Thus, increasing the amount of" output "produced from alternative energy or green energy sources reduces" the output and jobs "that would have been produced from fossil fuels." Hence, "net job creation may be zero (or negative)."
- "Given the capital-intensive nature of energy development (green or fossil fuels), it is unlikely that this sector would produce as many direct jobs as alternative uses of government support. The benefits would largely accrue to the owners of capital [i.e., business owners]."
Choosing between different forms of energy typically involves tradeoffs between competing objectives, such as affordability, environmental impacts, and energy security. AOC's Green New Deal and her rationalization for why it is "so, so controversial" disregard those practical realities while mangling the U.S. environmental record and pretending that one can make pollution-free energy and enrich people by multiplying the costs of their energy. The facts of science and economics say just the opposite.
James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a think tank dedicated to publishing rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.


text:
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Collect FeedbackAllRound gets 28% higher feedback responses
Book MeetingHobSpace gets 20% higher demo signups
Event RegistrationMudrex gets 280% more webinar signups
Gamify EmailsDrive engagement with games inside email
Recover CartsTraya gets 15% cart recovery rate
- Resources
- API & Integrations
Sync Contact from
Apps inside Email
- Pricing
WhatCounts Email Deliverability Tool
WhatCounts is an email service provider helping you send what counts with an amazing platform and full-service agency to back it up. We provide data management, software, and services to marketers seeking to deliver smart personalized digital messages to their target audiences.
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Tell the world how your tool helps email marketers send better emails and get discovered by more people.
What is WhatCounts Email Deliverability Tool?
WhatCounts offers an email deliverability tool that helps businesses improve their email marketing campaigns. With features like a simplified design, informative dashboards, and quick launch links, users can easily track and analyze the performance of their campaigns and automations. WhatCounts values customer feedback and continuously updates their platform to provide a better user experience.
- Simpler design for a better user experience.
- Reporting on marketing campaigns and automations.
- Quick link feature for easy navigation.
- Responsive to customer feedback and suggestions.
- Full-service agency offering a range of services and resources.
- Simplified design for a better user experience
- Reporting on marketing campaigns and automations
- Quick link feature for quicker navigation to frequently used sections of the platform
- Lack of detailed charts and graphs on the dashboard.
- Removal of the Timeline and Path Analysis features from the dashboard.
- Limited customization options for the quick link feature.
Get better ROI on
every email you send
hack for my business
Vineet Khare, Bella Vita Organic
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Racine, Wisconsin Electricians
The Trusted Choice for Electrical Repair, Maintenance, and Installation for Wisconsin
Roman Home Services is one of the longest running electrical contractors in Wisconsin. A trusted name since 1929, our award-winning, family owned business has flourished through three generations of dedicated management. We offer a wide range of residential and commercial electrical work including repair, maintenance, and installation. From the common to the complex, we can assist with any electrical project.
Experienced Electrical Technicians
Roman Home Services has fostered a strong community of professionals dedicated to serving [city] households. They include experienced electricians who are licensed, bonded and insured; many of whom have been on staff for decades. Our team of residential electrical experts work with the most modern equipment and service vehicles to insure superior customer service around the clock.
Our experienced technicians provide service, repair and maintenance for all electrical systems including:
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Discover why Roman Home Services is Wisconsin's oldest and most trusted electrical contractor. For over 9 decades, we've been helping residents with professional service, repair and maintenance of their electrical systems. Our dedicated and knowledgeable staff ensure that every customer is treated like family. When you call us you can always count on:
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text:
Article number: | WR36026 |
Availability: | In stock |
Artistic Wire is the most extensive line of permanently colored copper wire for jewelry and crafts. The wire has an exclusive enamel coating that is available in a high-shine metallic finish or in a matte finish. The coating is engineered to resist tarnishing, chipping and peeling. It will also stand up to coiling, spiral making, twisting, wrapping and other wire working techniques. You can form Artistic Wire easily into jewelry components such as chain maille, beaded chain, jump rings, gemstone settings and more. Use our wire range of tools including round nose pliers, chain nose pliers, hammers and anvils, jump ring makers, spiral makers, wire twisting tools, wire crinklers, wire rounders and more. Silver-plated Artistic Wire offers striking beauty and shine. These wires are made by first plating the copper wire with a precision layer of pure silver. Then a layer of unique enamel color is applied. The silver plating beneath the color adds an incredible high-shine and brilliance to the wire.
Color: Silver-plated non-tarnish silver
Wire Gauge: 26ga (0.41mm)
Packaging: Retail spool
Length of Wire on Spool: 30 yds (90 ft)