Pius XII Memorial Library Government Documents

Sexual orientation is in the news as the President in his State of the Union address proclaimed that the U. S. Armed Forces “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy should be eliminated. Response from some members of congress remind this pundit of another President who championed desegregation the U.S. Armed Forces and the response that that “bold” move engendered.

You can read the history of Truman’s decision here

Here is an excerpt of Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-CA) comments made to NPR’s All Things Considered, February 2, 2010… [Read more →]

iBus, Ubus, weBus, Omnibus, mini-Bus. Preparing a class on researching legislation and got caught up in the minutia of the Congressional  appropriations process. I am absolutely loving the Congressional Research Service (CRS) publication, The Congressional Appropriations Process: An Introduction, by Sandy Streeter.

Cobra (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) has always been one of my favorite government acroymns and I was super happy to see that there can also be a mini-bus. But read it for yourself, don’t let me spoil the exciting conclusion. The CRS  PDF is here.

BTW don’t even get me started on rescissions.

The food situation in Haiti is extremely fragile This was the lede  sentence from USDA news relase from 2004, we can only hope we won’t be seeing similar six years from now.

The FTC is concerned that the cloud could cost the cloudees their privacy. Here is a link to a FTC pdf explaining the concerns. Explained here at Ars Technica.

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The cast of the Wire, the renown TV series,  has nothing on the characters portrayed in the Wire, the official news magazine of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.  Volume 10, issue 39 includes pictures of the Latino Volleyball Team and a scathing review of the movie “A Christmas Carol”.  Take a look and see how our “Safe, Humane, Legal and Transparant” mission is progressing. Looking forward to a similar journal from the soon-to-be Illinois detainee prison.

Those wags at DARPA’s Transformational Convergence Technology Office have launched 10 red balloons over the USA to test crowd sourcing and social networking.  And apparently 300 (!!!) teams have signed on to identify the floaters and win a prize.  You can get all the details — I bet TV is all over this — at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency website or read an overview at the  Scientific American website.

Between the Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the latest Hollywood blockbuster 2012, I have been having conversations with friends and colleagues concerning the upcoming sequel to the dark ages when all literacy ceases. But I can’t rant in this space without a government documents tie-in, so thanks to the folks at NASA for responding to the insipid idiocy of Mayan prognostications and allowing me to vent. Debt has ravaged the consumers, leaving them with no choice but to  grab the pitchforks and torches…

Homeland Security is concerned about an upcoming threat to national security — winter.  Add a new color to the rainbow-schemed Security Advisory System -WHITE.  Read all about it at “Ready America“.  This and many other chilling publications are available to authorized subscribers to the Homeland Security Digital Library. My personal favorite is from the arctic experts at University of Florida–Extreme Cold and Winter Storms: The Disaster Handbook.

Web 2.0 has taken hold at Whitehouse.gov as the web site moves to reliance on Drupal (?) open source code for the underpinnings.

Considering the 1000+ page  length of the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 and America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 bills currently being considered by Congress it is interesting that the Executive branch is now spinning an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder explanation…

From Whitehouse.gov

Got four minutes? Watch a quick video that sums up the President’s plan to provide security and stability to those who have insurance and coverage for those who don’t.