26 Days until Inauguration - This budget mess isn't like the Energy Emergency After Bush Took Office, is it?

Some states have had exceptionally horrible years while waiting for relief from Washington and it never came. The states budgets have to be taken into consideration in any economic stimulus package. A vital job saved, is a job that maintains the tax base.


How to fix the California budget (click title to entry - thank you)
Tom Campbell
Thursday, December 25, 2008
There is a long-term, and a short-term, state budget problem in California.
In the long-term, we have to keep state spending from outstripping state revenue. We are not doing that: Our state spending has increased much faster than inflation and population over the last 10 years. For example, if you take former Gov. Gray Davis' first budget, which was enacted 10 years ago, and increase it for the inflation rate and California population growth since then, the state would be in a budget surplus, not deficit, today - even with the lower revenue because of the recession....

It's a Google Holiday Season - Tin Soldiers for Children - Job Creation

Less Exercise and Stress Threaten Captive Populations, Reseachers Say

More Photos (click here)

Kimani, a huge bull elephant, can be seen with his collar containing a sim card, Friday, Sept. 26, 2008 in the Ol Pejeta conservancy near Mt. Kenya. Save the Elephants has set up a project where they placed a mobile phone SIM card in an elephants collar, then set up a virtual "geofence" using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory's boundaries. (AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

By CATHERINE BRAHIC

Dec. 12, 2008

Zoos are "consuming" elephants, says a team of researchers and conservationists who have, for the first time, compared how the captive animals fare in comparison to their wild cousins.
The findings are not good for elephants looking forward to a life in a zoo: their life expectancy is significantly shorter than for those in African and Asian wild or working populations.
Despite the care elephants receive in captivity and the absence of predators, the study found that death rates in Western zoos are greater than birth rates, making the captive elephant population unsustainable. "The zoo population consumes rather than produces elephants," says Georgia Mason of the University of Guelph in Canada....