| 1587 | In the Roanoke Island colony, Ellinor and Ananias Dare become parents of a baby girl whom they name Virginia, the first English child born in what would become the United States. | |
| 1590 | John White, the leader of 117 colonists sent in 1587 to Roanoke Island (North Carolina) to establish a colony, returns from a trip to England to find the settlement deserted. No trace of the settlers is ever found. | |
| 1698 | After invading Denmark and capturing Sweden, Charles XII of Sweden forces Frederick IV of Denmark to sign the Peace of Travendal. | |
| 1759 | The French fleet is destroyed by the British under "Old Dreadnought" Boscawen at the battle of Lagos Bay. | |
| 1782 | Poet and artist William Blake marries Catherine Sophia Boucher. | |
| 1862 | Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart's headquarters is raided by Union troops of the 5th New York and 1st Michigan cavalries. | |
| 1864 | Union General William T. Sherman sends General Judson Kilpatrick to raid Confederate lines of communication outside Atlanta. The raid is unsuccessful. | |
| 1870 | Prussian forces defeat the French at the Battle of Gravelotte during the Franco-Prussian War. | |
| 1898 | Adolph Ochs takes over the New York Times, saying his aim is to give "the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is permissible in good society, and give it early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other medium." | |
| 1914 | Germany declares war on Russia while President Woodrow Wilson issues his Proclamation of Neutrality. | |
| 1920 | Tennessee becomes the thirty-sixth state to ratify the nineteenth amendment granting women's sufferage, completing the three-quarters necessary to put the amendment into effect. | |
| 1929 | The first cross-country women's air derby begins. Louise McPhetride Thaden wins first prize in the heavier-plane division, while Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie finishes first in the lighter-plane category. | |
| 1939 | The film The Wizard of Oz opens in New York City. | |
| 1942 | Japan sends a crack army to Guadalcanal to repulse the U.S. Marines fighting there. | |
| 1943 | The Royal Air Force Bomber Command completes the first major strike against the German missile development facility at Peenemunde. | |
| 1963 | James Meredith, the first African American to attend University of Mississippi, graduates. | |
| 1965 | Operation Starlite marks the beginning of major U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam. | |
| 1966 | Australian troops repulse a Viet Cong attack at Long Tan. | |
| 1969 | Two concert goers die at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, one from an overdose of heroin, the other from a burst appendix. | |
| 1991 | A group of hard-line communist leaders unhappy with the drift toward the collapse of the Soviet Union seize control of the government in Moscow and place President Mikhail S. Gorbachev under house arrest |
In the first decade, the big things are (i) conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, with much lower funding than projected under current law and (ii) sharp cuts in top tax rates and corporate taxes.How does Ryan get to claim that the deficit will be reduced in this phase? "Magic asterisks" — assertions that can't possibly be true, but which everyone accepts.
Is this a deficit-reduction program? Not on the face of it: it’s basically a tradeoff of reduced aid to the poor for reduced taxes on the rich, with the net effect of the specific proposals being to increase, not reduce, the deficit.
First, he insists that the tax cuts won’t reduce revenue, because they’ll be offset with unspecified “base-broadening”."Base-broadening" means broadening the tax base (taxing more things and/or closing loopholes). Right; lift your glass and say "Never gonna happen."
Second, there are large assumed cuts in discretionary spending relative to current policy[.]Both of these assertions (magic asterisks) were made without the hint of a shred of a list showing what they would do. That's what makes the asterisks magic; like Tinker Bell, you just gotta believe.
[M]uch of the supposed deficit reduction comes not from Medicare but from further cuts in discretionary spending [which eventually falls] to 3.5 percent of GDP ... this number includes defense, which is currently around 4 percent of GDP.Of course these are just lies to fool the eagerly-fooled press and the wingnut rubes. The plan's proponents know these are just assertions.
[S]lashing Medicaid, cutting taxes on corporations and high-income people, and replacing Medicare with a drastically less well funded voucher system.It's the asterisks that make this look like "deficit reduction."
On the same day a judge cleared the way for the state's new voter identification law to take effect, the Corbett administration abandoned plans to allow voters to apply online for absentee ballots for the November election and to register online to vote.
A spokesman for the Department of State said county elections officials told the agency that implementing the new online initiatives as well as voter ID requirements was too much to handle less than three months before the election.
But Stephanie Singer, the top elections official in Philadelphia, said she was unaware that there was an issue with setting up a system to allow voters to register and apply for absentee ballots online, and said shifting more activity online would actually make for less paperwork.
How
do you get criminal charges against you dropped? Here's the unusual story
of how one fugitive got the Feds to drop the charges against him: he's
TOO guilty!The federal government has more than 400,000 pages of evidence against fugitive Miami doctor Armando Angulo, taking up some two terabytes of digital space. On the surface, it sounds like a pretty solid case. But at the urging of prosecutors, charges were dropped against the doctor because the evidence is simply taking up too much space on government servers.
"Continued storage of these materials is difficult and expensive," wrote Stephanie Rose, the U.S. attorney for northern Iowa, describing the ongoing evidence storage as "an economic and political hardship" for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
As the Associated Press notes, the collection of evidence against Angulo, who is charged with illegally selling prescription medicines online, is enough to print the classic novel "War and Peace" 625,000 times.
Pussy Riot's supporters and opposition activists accused Putin of personally orchestrating the case against them. "They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge," said Alexey Navalny, the opposition's de facto leader. "The verdict was written by Vladimir Putin."
The three women were arrested in March after performing an anti-Putin "punk prayer" inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The case against them is seen as serving two functions: a warning to other dissidents, and an appeal to Putin's conservative base. Russia's growing campaign against gay rights is seen as a part of that effort, and on Friday Moscow's main court upheld a 100-year ban on gay pride rallies.
“I bought a Saiga because it was made in Russia, right beside its big brothers, the AKs,” Josh Laura, a garage door installer and former Marine in Maryville, Tenn., said in a telephone interview. “No rifle in the world has been as reliable as this one.”Importing Russia’s Top Gun
Selling rifles to Americans and other civilians is fundamental to the efforts to save Izhmash, which has made Kalashnikovs since soon after their invention in 1947 but is now struggling.
Demand for new military guns in the Kalashnikov family has evaporated. Simple, durable and relatively cheap to manufacture, about 100 million have been produced over the decades, or about one for every 70 people on earth. Inventories are overflowing, used AK weapons have flooded the market, and cheap Chinese knockoffs are stealing many of the customers that remain.
Americans
celebrate Pi Day on March 14 (3/14), but earlier this week on August 14,
we celebrate something kind of related:Just after 2:29 p.m. EDT today, the American population reached 314,159,265, or pi (3.14159265) times 100 million, according to the Census Bureau's population clock.Megan Gannon of LifeScience has the story: here
"This is a once in many generations event ... so go out and celebrate this American pi," demographer Howard Hogan said in a statement from the Census Bureau.
