911 Commission Report - Free!

If you have an Ebook Reader - either on your desktop or on a Palm Pilot, PocketPC,etc, then you can download a free copy of the full 911 Commission Report at Fictionwise . Looks to be fairly easy reading. Check it out. You can also download an audio version from Audible.com for $4.95.

Is this what you want America?
According to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday, households with incomes in the top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090. Fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually...... Mr. Kerry would seek to roll back the tax cuts for households with incomes above $200,000 a year, a move his campaign estimates would save $860 billion over 10 years, and use that money in large part to pay for a vast new national health care plan ( Middle and Lower Income America - Time to go Vote! (Source - NY Times )

Olympics
Just a reminder - NBC tonight from 8-11 p.m. (Eastern) - Opening Ceremonies !

Birding
A red footed Falcon makes its way to the Western Hemisphere for the first time! Sighted on Martha's Vineyard, one of the observers was David Sibley, creator of an encyclopedic series of books on birds, who also heard about the bird on Tuesday. "I found out what the earliest ferry was and came right over," said Mr. Sibley, who lives in Concord, Mass. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing."

Mr. Sibley said the bird was male, just over a year old. "It still has the feathers that have the pattern of juvenile feathers," he said.

Red-footed falcons winter in southern and western Africa and breed in Eastern Europe, principally in Russia, Mr. Laux said. No one can say how the bird got here, but this species is adapted for long-distance flying. It may have come from Africa on trade winds or storm winds, and made its way north from South America. Or it could have come across the North Atlantic from England, Ireland or Iceland, where red-footed falcons have been spotted sporadically in recent years. To hear it's voice, go to this page . A high-pitched Ki-ki-ki, not unlike the kestrel, but more drawn-out and mournful.

Word of the Day
putative - Thought, assumed, or alleged to be such or to exist (the child's putative father) (ignorantly entered into a putative marriage before the divorce from a previous spouse was final)

Quote of the Day
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
Robertson Davies

Market Indexes Year to Date
DOW -4.93
NASDAQ -11.03
S&P 500 -2.04
(Vote Kerry/Edwards!)

Markets Shaky

Stock Market continues to stagger - will be an interesting week coming up, especially to hear what the Fed has to say on Tues. DJIA is down 6% for the year and the Nasdaq down 11% - not a pretty picture. New job creation in July was absymal - only 32,000 new jobs created - a bit short of the some 215,000 predicted by the Govt - hey - thought those tax cuts were supposed to fix up the economy? Too bad the fat cats get the cuts and they just bank it rather than spend it. If you want the economy to move - give the little guy some money - he'll spend it.

From News for Real : A free market economy operates just like a natural world eco-chain - trouble anywhere along the chain quickly cascades throughout the entire system. Consumers under stress stop spending, orders for goods slow causing wholesalers to cut future orders from manufacturers, who lay off workers. Those workers then come under stress and stop spending, which then triggers the next downward cycle

Book Worth Reading
Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy by Robert F Kennedy, Jr. From an article by Kennedy - But George W. Bush's policy advisers somehow don't see the benefits we've received from our investments in America's environmental infrastructure. All they see is the cost of compliance to their campaign contributors – a group that is led by the nation's most egregious polluters. This myopic vision has led the White House to abandon its responsibility to protect the public trust......James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first Interior secretary, once promised, "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber." In April 2001, a retired James Watt told the Denver Post, "Everything Cheney's saying, everything the president's saying, they're saying exactly what we were saying 20 years ago, precisely. Twenty years later, it sounds like they've just dusted off the old work."

Olympics
Tune in to NBC from 7-11 p.m. Eastern this coming Friday (August 13th) for the Opening Ceremonies. Prior to that, you can watch the Women's Soccer team take on Greece (live) on MSNBC from 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Wednesday, August 11th. Another interesting match before the Opening ceremonies begin is Irag against Portugual on MSNBC on Thursday, Aug 12th from 12-3:30 p.m. Action starts in earnest on Saturday, the 14th with coverage from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and from 7-11p.m. on NBC. If you want to catch the Women's softball team and maybe catch fireballer Jennie Finch in action, tune in to CNBC from 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. on Saturday.

It will be interesting to see how Greece is able to pull off the Olympics - cross your fingers that the terroists stay home. The other day I had the chance to watch an interesting flyover of all the Greek Isles - think that was probably on PBS - beautiful and interesting - never really gave that much thought to how many islands were actually there - would be fun to jump from one to one - think I'll wait till after the Olympics are over, however . :)