Is Porn Responsible for the Financial Crisis?

Is Porn Responsible for the Financial Crisis?  SEC staff were surfing pornography instead of watching the financial system:

_ A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

_ Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” earning salaries of up to $222,418.

Private-sector jobs in the U.S. dropped by 23,000 this month. Above, unemployed Americans line up as they wait to gain entry to meet employers at the Los Angeles Career Fair in March.

Private payrolls fell in March, according to data released Wednesday. The news rattled investors and economists who had expected March would show a gain in payrolls.

Private-sector jobs in the U.S. dropped by 23,000 this month, according to a national employment report published Wednesday by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers.

The ADP survey tallies only private-sector jobs, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ nonfarm payroll data, to be released Friday, include government workers. The addition of workers for the 2010 census is expected to lift federal government payrolls.

go to the foundation’s web site for the longer list.

• Impose 10% excise tax on indoor tanning services
• Employer W-2 reporting of value of health benefits
• Increase in additional tax on distributions from HSAs and Archer MSAs not used for qualified medical expenses to 20%
• Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of branded drugs
• Impose 2.3% excise tax on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices
• Eliminate deduction for expenses allocable to Medicare Part D subsidy
• Raise 7.5% AGI floor on medical expenses deduction to 10%
• Broaden Medicare Hospital Insurance Tax Base for High-Income Taxpayers
• Increase by 15.75 percentage points the required corporate estimated tax payments factor for corporations with assets of at least $1 billion for payments due in July, August, and September 2014

Well, you get the idea. Oh, by the way. The Bush tax cuts will soon expire on top of that.

After a year of crippling delays, President Obama’s $5 billion program to install weather-tight windows and doors has retrofitted a fraction of homes and created far fewer construction jobs than expected.

After a year of crippling delays, President Obama’s $5 billion program to install weather-tight windows and doors has retrofitted a fraction of homes and created far fewer construction jobs than expected.

In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs.

The health care overhaul will cost U.S. companies billions and make them more likely to drop prescription drug coverage for retirees because of a change in how the government subsidizes those benefits.

In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.

Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: “It’s one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science.” He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study’s conclusion.

“Retraction is a regular part of the publication process,” he said. “Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances.”

Ron Paul has won the CPAC straw Presidential vote with 31 percent of the total. This is dismaying, to the extent one takes it seriously. Ron Paul is the crazy uncle in the Republican Party’s attic. He is not a principled libertarian like, say, Steve Forbes. Rather, as I noted in this post, where I likened him to Pee-Wee Herman, Paul has a rather sinister history as a hater and conspiracy theorist. He has no business being taken seriously as a Presidential contender–and that’s before we even start talking about his inadequate vision of national security or his disgraceful performance in the 2008 Presidential debates.

SAN DIEGO — A successful AIDS vaccine remains elusive, but researchers say aggressive, early anti-viral therapy might provide a way to derail the spread of disease.

The goal is to catch new AIDS cases early and administer therapy to reduce the amount of virus in the patient’s system.

Anti-retroviral therapy has increased in the past five years. But it’s been given too late in the course of infection.

By the time people start therapy they have infected most of those that they would have infected anyway. That’s according to Brian Williams of the South African Center for Epidemiological Modeling and Analysis.