250 high-tech ‘smart pay phones’ set to invade New York City

New taxi’s with odor-absorbing seats aren’t the only upgrades New York City is getting. The Big Apple’s 12,800 decaying public pay phones could be replaced with large touchscreens that are good for making more than just voice calls. One day, you might be tweeting from one of these “smart pay phones.”

When the cellphone revolution hit its peak in the mid-’90s, it became clear that public pay phones would slowly become obsolete. Really, pre-paid cellphones can be had in some places for $10 and that’s with a basic mobile phone included.

A company called City24x7 wants to revive the pay phone’s role as an integral part of New York City with “smart” touchscreen booths. As part of a pilot program, it plans to install 250 32-inch displays that let citizens make Skype calls (video ones too), search for restaurant info, get shopping discount info, updates on traffic and safety alerts. The booths will even act as Wi-Fi hotspots.

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Couple things here from my side:

Who made CNN and this person the official Obama arbiter of who can and can not criticize our president?

And next, CNN and this person would have made a hero out of anyone who criticized Bush!

Just standard hypocritical CNN asshole!

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MORE  HERE

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And here is the littlest smoke nazi on the planet.

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How much out of debt will Obama’s Buffett tax take us?

As Obama pounds the drums of class warfare….

Would the Buffett Rule tax raise much money? No, it wouldn’t. According to Congress’ official tax analysts, a Democrat bill designed to enact the tax would generate just $31 billion over the next 11 years. And that’s assuming crafty tax lawyers can’t figure out some new ways to hide that income, meaning less tax revenue. Of course, a simple way of doing this is to simply not realize capital gains. As e21 points out:

The higher the tax rate, the more powerful the incentive to avoid realizations. A “Buffet rule” or similar device to increase the capital gains tax rate on the top 1% would lead to economically damaging “lock-in effect,” where capital is not allocated to its most efficient use because of the tax disincentive to liquidate an existing investment. (A related issue is the elaborate tax-planning schemes where some investors use derivatives to replicate a sale without triggering tax liability.)

Would the Buffett Rule tax really make the tax system more progressive? Not so much. According to the Tax Policy Center, “middle-income households, on average, will pay 2015 taxes totaling about 15% of their income (using the legislation’s definition). Without the Buffett rule, more than 99 percent of millionaires will pay more than that and only about 4,000 will pay less. Barely 10 percent of them will pay less than 20 percent.” As it is, the total average effective tax rate-including payroll taxes-for the top 1 percent is already 30 percent vs. just 12.6 percent for the middle 20 percent. In fact, the top 0.1% pay 32.1% vs. 0.8% for the bottom 20%.

Also, taxpayers who only pay the 15% capital gains/dividend tax aren’t really just paying a 15% rate. That income is actually double taxed, first at the corporate level and then at the individual level. Indeed, a new report from Ernst & Young found that the current top U.S. integrated dividend tax rate is 50.8 percent-which will rise to 68.6 percent in 2013-while the 50.8 percent integrated capital gains tax rate will rise to 56.7 percent in 2013. So the whole premise of the Buffett Rule – that some group of superwealthy Americans are paying some minimal tax rate – is false.

Would the Buffett Tax rule make the economy stronger? No, it wouldn’t. The Buffett Rule tax would move the tax code further away from the necessary goal of eliminating its bias against investment and toward consumption. Economic simulations have repeatedly indicated that replacing the income tax system with a consumption tax would boost economic growth. Even without the Buffett Rule, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and new taxes under Obamacare would raise taxes on capital gains to 24% and dividends to 45%, triple today’s rate. Of course, just last year, the Obama administration noted in its budget that the lower dividend rate “reduces the tax bias against equity investment and promotes a more efficient allocation of capital.”

Go and read HERE.

But, and yes there is a but….what instead of taxing (which Obama and the democrats love to do at all times) Obama reduced spending by just a measly 1%?

Obama’s solution to health care costs? Raising taxes on tanning salons and medical device manufacturers.

Obama’s solution to high gas prices? Raising taxes on oil companies.

Obama’s solution to a struggling economy? Raising taxes on investors through the “Buffett Rule.”

Notice a pattern here?

Of course, even if the “Buffett Rule” were enacted, the amount of revenue to the government is miniscule compared to both the annual deficit and our accumulated debt.

Savings from instituting the “Buffett Rule” in one year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation: $5.1 billion.

By 2022, the committee estimates the Buffett Rule could be generating an additional $7 billion in revenue.

Savings from cutting federal spending from its fiscal 2011 level by one percent: $33.6 billion.

In other words, asking every federal agency and department to get by with 99 percent of what it received last year would generate six times the savings of the Buffett Rule.

Go read more HERE.

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BACON!!!!

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All those race baiters on the left do not care about the statistics….

Blacks kill more blacks than anyone else combined:

Black-on-black crime is a sensitive subject in this increasingly polarized nation. While covered in academia and occasionally addressed by talking heads on television, some believe it rarely, if ever, receives the type and depth of attention it deserves. Instead, critics argue that this national tragedy is usually swept under the rug by powerful interest groups and individuals more concerned with elevating their own racially-driven agendas than addressing the real issues at hand. The Trayvon Martin case is only the most recent example of this grim hypocrisy.

Indeed, statistics support a very different narrative than the one usually offered by “race hustlers,” as Pastor C.L. Bryant calls them, who routinely portray an America where members of the black community are selectively targeted and brutalized by white racists.

A 2007 special report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, reveals that approximately 8,000 — and, in certain years, as many as 9,000 African Americans are murdered annually in the United States. This chilling figure is accompanied by another equally sobering fact, that 93% of these murders are in fact perpetrated by other blacks. The analysis, supported by FBI records, finds that in 2005 alone, for example, African Americans accounted for 49% of all homicide victims in the US — again, almost exclusively at the hands of other African Americans.

To put these number in perspective, recall that over 6,400 U.S. service men and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over the course of a decade-long war fought in those nations. During the Vietnam War, which lasted nearly 13 years, some 58,000 Americans were killed — nearly 13 percent of whom were African American.
Extrapolating black-on-black crime data reveals that, by comparison, approximately 100,000 African Americans have been killed on our own streets at the hands of other African Americans in roughly the same stretches of time. It is difficult to find anyone who would white-wash these mind-numbing statistics.

Equally as startling, the same study reveals African Americans were victims of an estimated 805,000 nonfatal violent crimes in just one year alone.

What’s more, blacks comprise roughly 12.5 percent of the U.S. population.

While fatalities persist in every major metropolitan area across the nation, there are of course certain cities most impacted by violent crime. Take Cincinnati, for example, where, after the fatal shooting of a young black man by a white police officer in 2001, a wave of riots ensued. Since that time, Cincinnati has set the record for the number of murders carried out each year, with a persistent violent crime rate at a staggering 88 percent.

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This is just plain weird! But there probably is a big market for these!

Go HERE.

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Last week, “an unelected group of people” over at the Environmental Protection Agency revised our national energy policy, approving a new gasoline blend with up to 15% ethanol, known as E15, which may be available in pumps this summer.  Currently, most gasoline sold in the U.S. is E10, containing a maximum of 10% ethanol.

To review the backstory: the last time ethanol was in the news, it seems like its opponents, who come from both the environmental left and free-market right, had won a significant victory.  Last summer, “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” to use Obama’s words about ObamaCare, voted to discontinue subsidies for ethanol, effective 12/31/11.

The president termed the vote to end subsidies “ill-advised.”  Funny how he rails against “giveaways for the oil companies” — which turn out to be tax write-offs afforded to most businesses — yet had no compunctions about paying out 45 cents per gallon to ethanol producers.  Rather than an “all of the above” energy policy, Obama seems to be pursuing “nothing from below.”

Theoretically, 900,000 gallons of ethanol per day would produce a $17-billion annual subsidy.  The actual number reported was lower, in the $6- to $10-billion range, but still much greater than the oil company tax write-offs of $4 billion that Obama finds outrageous, amounting to a few pennies per gallon of gasoline produced.  (Four billion dollars spread over $133 billion gallons of gasoline per year comes out to 3 cents a gallon, and that doesn’t take into account all the other petroleum products that oil companies provide.)

In any case, it appeared that common sense had prevailed.  Ethanol was driving global food prices higher, causing riots in developing countries; rain forests were being destroyed so corn and sugarcane could be cultivated; cars got poorer mileage with ethanol; corn was being raised with genetically modified seed and chemical fertilizers that run off into aquifers; ethanol production was producing more greenhouse gases than the petroleum it replaced, if you worry about things like that; and on top of it all, many analysts question whether ethanol production results in any net energy gain — i.e., it might take more energy for tractor fuel, processing, fertilizer, etc. than we get out of the final product.

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Those of us in the blogosphere who were around during the CBS News/Rathergate scandal remember how the narrative arc went:

*CBS perpetuated journalistic fraud.

*Conservative bloggers and alternative media called out Dan Rather and his con artist producer Mary Mapes for their malpractice.

*CBS denied and delayed addressing the hoax.

*The mainstream media tried to shoot the messenger and discredit critics of CBS/Rather.

*The evidence of bias was overwhelming — forcing CBS to appoint an independent review panel that concluded that the network “failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece,” was “rigid and blind” in its defense, and demonstrated “myopic zeal” in its manufacturing of the Bush/National Guard fraud. After the report was issued, Mapes and three executives were fired and the editorial practices at CBs were revamped.

History now repeats itself.

NBC News has attempted to deny, whitewash, and Friday news dump its way out of Editgate. Thanks to Breitbart.com, Newsbusters.org, Sean Hannity, and the conservative blogosphere, the story’s not going away.

Scapegoating an anonymous producer won’t do.

See Les Jones and Tom Maguire for the latest:

The BS Runs Deep At MSNBC

NBC fires editor for altering Zimmerman 911 call; when will MSNBC fire the writer who did the same?

When everyone from actor Don Cheadle to liberal lawyer/bloggerJeralyn Merritt is questioning the network’s mishandling of the Editgate aftermath, it’s time for the network to put it in someone else’s hands:

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Woman strips naked at DIA (Denver)…funny story!

DENVER – A female passenger at Denver International Airport caused a stir Tuesday morning when she stripped naked inside Concourse B, airport officials said.

The incident happened at about 8:45 a.m. when, according to DIA spokeswoman Jenny Schiavone, the woman was caught smoking a cigarette at gate B81, in a non-smoking area.

At some point after airport workers told her to extinguish the cigarette, the woman took off her clothing. It wasn’t immediately clear why. However, Denver Police say it was unrelated to the smoking issue.

Go HERE.

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NASA greats and legends skewer NASA for being pretty much of an embarrassment to science based on their AGW stance.

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”
“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”
“We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject.”

Read the full story HERE

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Want to win a contract to operate concessions on federal property? Be ready to explain how your business promotes Obama administration desires like “climate friendly strategies” and the first lady’s “Let’s Move!” anti-childhood obesity effort.

Proposal documents obtained by The Daily Caller reveal that the National Park Service favors those who promote these Obama White House priorities when deciding which concessioners they will allow to operate businesses on federally owned property.

The documents outline what criteria the National Park Service considered when awarding a concessions contract for operating the Silver Gull Beach Club and Breezy Point Beach Club on federally owned land in New York this summer.

These guidelines tell bidders that the National Park Service is “interested in supporting the goals of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! Initiative.”

Read more:

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If you think Obama is doing so damn good (you might be a damn liberal):

Let the record speak for itself:

1. Every fifth man in America is out of a job. Indeed, black male unemployment is now at the highest rate it has ever been since the U.S. government began collecting statistics on the subject in 1972. Just 56.9 percent of black men over the age of 20 are now working. Indeed, according to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), one out of every six African Americans, male or female, are now unemployed.

2. Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.

3. On the last day of President Bush’s presidency, gas prices were $1.84 a gallon. Today under Obama, the average price of a gallon of gas costs $3.94. Easter weekend in Catalina Island, California, drivers saw prices topping $7 a gallon.

4. In 2006 and 2007, 90% of all college graduates found a job. Under Obama, just 56% of college graduates are able to find a job.

5. More than one in four U.S. homeowners are “under water” or owe more than their homes are worth. The housing crisis has now destroyed $7 trillion in U.S. household wealth. Another 9.5 million homes are still at risk of default, sparking what analysts believe will be a second wave of foreclosures in the months to come.

6. President Obama has increased the national debt more in three years than President Bush did in eight. Under Bush, the debt rose $4.899 trillion in eight years. In three years, Obama has exploded the debt by $4.939 trillion.

7. A record 87,897,000 Americans are no longer in the labor force. When the number of individuals who have stopped looking for a job and/or who are working part-time but desire full-time employment is included–a figure known as the “underemployment rate”–real unemployment stands at 19.1%.

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