Day: December 21, 2015

Winter 2015 Starts Now

Winter 2015 Starts Now
With temperatures in the 70s this week, don’t expect any scenes like this, this Christmas.

Winter 2015 Starts Now — Today, Dec. 21, is 2015’s winter solstice which is the day with the fewest hours of sunlight during the whole year.

If this website’s clock is properly synched it is 11:48  p.m.. EST.  and that means winter has started.

The word solstice comes from the Latin words for “sun” and “to stand still.” As per the Old Farmer’s Almanac: In the Northern Hemisphere, as summer advances to winter, the points on the horizon where the Sun rises and sets advance southward each day; the high point in the Sun’s daily path across the sky, which occurs at local noon, also moves southward each day.

At the winter solstice, the Sun’s path has reached its southernmost position. The next day, the path will advance northward. However, a few days before and after the winter solstice, the change is so slight that the Sun’s path seems to stay the same, or stand still. The Sun is directly overhead at “high-noon” on Winter Solstice at the latitude called the Tropic of Capricorn.

Winter 2015 Starts Now

Top Donors 2014 As Per Sunlight

Top Donors 2014 As Per SunlightTop Donors 2014— Sunlight Foundation which does yeoman’s work showing how our political campaigns and crusades are funded recently distributed a best-of 2015 which included this dissection from April of where the money went in the 2014 election from the “one percent of the one percent”.  They hold this category contains 31,976 persons who contributed $1.18 billion.

Sunlight noted that this money skewed slightly to the GOP and conservatives — $553 million verses $505 million to Democrats and liberals. The top donors, however, were overwhelmingly D.

Liberal hedge fund manger Tom Steyer  spent $73,884, 467,  which is more than the next 17 Republicans combined. A nice chunk of it went to the campaign for Tom Wolf.

The number 2 donor was former New York Mayor Michale Bloomberg who once upon a time was a Republican but has since moved solely into the camp of country-club progressives. He gave $11,042,800 of which $10,527,600 went to the left.

Sunlight is a critic of Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that held that the First Amendment prohibited government interference with political spending by non-profit groups. Much of this money now goes to “super PACs” which are political action committees that don’t make direct contributions to candidates but stick to issues.

Criticism of Citizens United is extremely short-sighted. The Supreme Court got it right. The largest media organization in the world is Philadelphia-based Comcast. It’s “news” outlets are NBC and its spin-offs, which are basically Democrat propaganda machines. The New York Times, despite its fading reputation, is also a partisan mouthpiece. There is no inherent difference between a group of people chipping in to send out mailings and make posters to disseminate information than a New York Times front page story except that the mailings and posters are likely  far more honest and accurate.

Top Donors 2014 As Per Sunlight