GREEN BAY, Wis. — Aaron Rodgers threw five touchdown passes for the first time in his career and helped the Green Bay Packers nail down the No. 1 seeding in the NFC and claim another round of bragging rights in the NFL's most storied rivalry by knocking the Chicago Bears out of the playoff chase.PREVIOUSLY: "Leianna's Hot Green Bay Packers Lingerie."
Rodgers threw two touchdowns to Jordy Nelson, another two to James Jones, and he found tight end Jermichael Finley for a score as the Packers beat the Bears, 35-21, on Sunday night.
Clay Matthews made a key first-half interception for the Packers (14-1), who needed the win to tie down home-field advantage in the NFC.
The loss eliminated the Bears (7-8) from playoff contention and put the Atlanta Falcons in the playoffs as at least a wild card.
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| Powder River Basin Coal Extraction |
Overall U.S. coal production has dipped slightly since 2008, and federal coal leases have fallen more sharply. Coal production totaled 1.17 billion short tons in 2008, according to the Energy Information Agency. It declined to 1.074 billion tons in 2009 and last year reached 1.084 billion. It is expected to be roughly 1.08 billion tons in 2011.In 2009 the average sales price of coal at mines producing each of the four major ranks of coal:
The number of tons the government leased each year over the past three years has averaged 272 million. The Bush administration, by contrast, leased an average of 515 million tons annually between 2002 and 2008. But federal royalties are rising, reaching $701 million in fiscal 2011.The center of gravity for coal production in the United States has shifted over the past few decades for both economic and environmental reasons, moving from central Appalachia to the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. Central Appalachia now produces just 17 percent of the nation’s coal compared with 70 percent in the 1970s.
The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake, both strategically and theoretically ... The explicit strategy was abandoned by around the turn of the century, but not after a lot of bad stuff had been written in all kinds of places. There was way more than the Ron Paul newsletters. There was the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which was another major place publishing these sorts of views. They could also be found in a whole bunch of Mises Institute publications of that era. It was the latter that led me to ask to be taken off the Institute’s mailing list in the early 1990s, calling them “a fascist fist in a libertarian glove.” I have never regretted that decision or that language. What the media has in their hands is only the tip of the iceberg of the really unsavory garbage that the paleo turn produced back then.Read the whole thing at the link.
Through it all though, Ron Paul was a constant. He kept plugging away, first at the center of the paleo strategy as evidenced by the newsletters. To be clear, I am quite certain he did not write them. There is little doubt that they were written by Rockwell and Rothbard. People I know who were on the inside at the time confirm it and the style matches pretty well to those two and does not match to Ron Paul. Paul knows who wrote them too, but he’s protecting his long-time friend and advisor, unfortunately. And even more sadly, Rockwell doesn’t have the guts to confess and end this whole megillah. So although I don’t think Ron Paul is a racist, like Archie Bunker, he was willing to, metaphorically, toast a marshmallow on the cross others were burning.
Even after the paleo strategy was abandoned, Ron was still there walking the line between “mainstream” libertarianism and the winking appeal to the hard right courted by the paleo strategy. Paul’s continued contact with the fringe groups of Truthers, racists, and the paranoid right are well documented. Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message? Doesn’t it suggest that years of the paleo strategy of courting folks like that actually resonated with the worst of the right? Paul also maintained his connection with the Mises Institute, which has itself had numerous connections with all kinds of unsavory folks: more racists, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, the whole nine yards. Much of this stuff was ably documented in 2007 and 2008 by the Right Watch blog. Hit that link for more.
Those of us who watched all of this happen over two decades knew it would come back to haunt us and so it has, unfortunately just as Ron Paul and libertarianism are on the cusp of something really amazing. And that only goes to show what a mistake the paleo strategy was: imagine if the newsletters were not an issue and Paul were to win Iowa. Yeah, he might get ignored, but he would not be the easy media target he is now, nor would all of libertarianism pay a potential price. The legions of young people supporting Paul did not come in via the paleo strategy; they came because libertarianism in general is on the rise in all kinds of venues (and yes, the Mises Institute’s post-paleo influence is important here, but it’s hardly the only institution that matters). These young people, for the most part, are surprised by all of this dirty laundry. That, in my view, is the real tragedy: I think libertarianism could have got to this point just as fast, maybe faster, without the toxic baggage of the paleo strategy.
So why deal with this now, when libertarianism is so hot? Because those newsletters are not what libertarianism is and the sooner and louder we make that clear, the better. There are too many young people who don’t understand all of this and who we need to help see the alternative liberal vision of libertarianism – and to understand that “liberal libertarianism” is radical, principled, and humane and not “beltway selling out.” To do that, we need to confront the past and explicitly reject it. That doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting Ron Paul in electoral politics, but it does mean that we cannot pretend the past doesn’t exist and it means that Paul and the others involved need to do the right thing and take explicit responsibility for what they said two decades ago. That has not happened yet. Then we need a complete and utter rejection of the paleo world-view and we need to create a movement that will simply not be attractive to racists, homophobes, anti-Semites etc., by emphasizing, as we have done at this blog, libertarianism’s liberal roots.
In another safety scare for China's dairy industry, the country's biggest milk producer says it has destroyed a batch of milk which was found to have high levels of a cancer-causing toxin. The problem was discovered before the milk tainted with high levels of aflatoxin was sold to the public, Mengniu Dairy Group said in a statement on its website.
"Mengniu would like to express our sincere apologies to consumers," the company said, adding none of the tainted products had made their way into the market.
"We will draw a big lesson from this incident and will work harder to meet all national and corporate standards on quality in the future," it said.
Aflatoxin is a carcinogenic substance produced by a fungus.
Mengniu said in its statement that the milk was made at one of its plants in Sichuan province in southwestern China. Read More
A renewed military campaign in Syria has reportedly killed at least 20 people as an Arab League delegation arrives in the country to assess the ongoing crisis. Heavy machine gun fire and mortar shells fired by government troops targeted the Baba Amr district of Homs, activists said.
It is the third day of violence following car bombs that rocked the capital Damascus which killed 44 people and wounded over 100 more.
YouTube videos purportedly filmed in Homs, show a number of tanks lined up opposite what appear to be residential homes, and firing randomly.
Activists have called for the Arab delegation to visit the city immediately in order to witness the continued crackdown, which has left more than 300 dead around the country in the last week alone.
France has led calls for the observers to head straight to Homs: "The Damascus authorities must imperatively, in accordance with the Arab League plan, allow observers access this afternoon to the city of Homs, where the violence is particularly bloody," spokesman Bernard Valero said
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also echoed the call of activists for the League to travel straight to the opposition city, particularly the "disaster-stricken" Baba Amr district.
"We urge the Arab observers to head immediately to Baba Amr to be witnesses to the crimes against humanity that are being perpetrated by the Syrian regime," the Observatory said in a statement. Read More
