Speedtest results: AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet

Speedtest results: AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet

Nine straight! Illini 75, Mizzou 59!!!

The Illini improve to 11-1...

ST. LOUIS -- Demetri McCamey got out of Illinois coach Bruce Weber's doghouse in a hurry by leading a rout of Missouri (Unranked ESPN/USA Today, No. 25 AP).

McCamey scored all but two of his 20 points in an almost perfect first half of a 75-59 victory Tuesday night, the Fighting Illini's ninth straight in the annual Braggin' Rights game. Three days earlier, he had just seven points against Detroit.

"My first couple of shots, they were falling," McCamey said. "And I kept shooting."

Weber joked that maybe he should put McCamey on notice every week, noting that the sophomore guard was on his game from tipoff.

McCamey's 20 points power Illinois' manhandling of Missouri

The end of another successful Y-Hoops league season...

The Blazers finished off an unbeaten season this morning (with one tie) at 6-0-1. What a great team and what fun we had! Kudos and congratulations to all the Blazers:

• George
  
• Jack
  
• Joe
  
• Luke
  
• Maeve
  
• Michael
  
• Nick
  
• Pete
  
• Sam
  
• Tanner

We made huge strides, fundamentally, as a team. The YMCA referees purposely called more legitimate traveling and double-dribbling violations this fall, and our kids learned to adjust to these parameters. It troubled us at first, but by slowing down and maintaining control of the pace, our kids played their best ball in our last game of the season.

So the record for the "three-headed monster" players - George, Jack, Joe, Luke and Michael - and coaches now improves as follows:

Fall 2008:    6-0-1   0.929
Winter 2008:  6-1-0   0.857
Fall 2007:    7-0-0   1.000
Winter 2007:  7-0-0   1.000
---------------------------
Total:       26-1-1   0.946

We had a blast again this fall!

On to Park District hoops...

Congress Pushed Fannie, Freddie In Wrong Direction During 1990s

BY TERRY JONES
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 9/25/2008

It was October 1992, nearly 15 years before the housing meltdown and subprime crisis.

Republican Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa was on the floor of the House, talking about something that no one at the time seemed to care about: the potential danger that Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) posed to the economy.

In remarks later reported by the Washington Post, Leach warned that Fannie and Freddie were changing "from being agencies of the public at large to money machines for the stockholding few."

Leach's prescient comments went unheeded — indeed, Congress spent the next decade and a half avoiding the alarms going off around Fannie and Freddie. Until, that is, it was too late.

Led by top Democrats, including Rep. Barney Frank in the House and Sen. Chris Dodd in the Senate, Congress not only did nothing about the growing risks at Fannie and Freddie, it in essence doubled down on their risks.

Congress Pushed Fannie, Freddie In Wrong Direction During 1990s

WBBM-TV: Feds may indict Blagojevich

CHICAGO (UPI) -- U.S. federal agents say they have enough evidence to indict Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for fraud and conspiracy, WBBM-TV, Chicago, reported Thursday.

The CBS-owned station also said an indictment of Blagojevich, the first Democrat elected to Illinois' governorship in 30 years, was "not imminent."

WBBM-TV: Feds may indict Blagojevich

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable

BY TERRY JONES
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 9/24/2008

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?

The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac, (FRE) even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.

In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable

'Crony' Capitalism Is Root Cause Of Fannie And Freddie Troubles

BY TERRY JONES
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 9/22/2008

In the past couple of weeks, as the financial crisis has intensified, a new talking point has emerged from the Democrats in Congress: This is all a "crisis of capitalism," in socialist financier George Soros' phrase, and a failure to regulate our markets sufficiently.

Well, those critics may be right — it is a crisis of capitalism. A crisis of politically driven crony capitalism, to be precise.

Indeed, Democrats have so effectively mastered crony capitalism as a governing strategy that they've convinced many in the media and the public that they had nothing whatsoever to do with our current financial woes.

'Crony' Capitalism Is Root Cause Of Fannie And Freddie Troubles

Cool site: SyscraperPage.com - Chicago, IL

Only highrise buildings that have a drawing are shown, ordered by official height. Includes buildings of built, under-construction and proposed status.

SyscraperPage.com - Chicago, IL

The Chicago Spire

Have you heard about the soon-to-be-built Chicago Spire?

Scheduled for completion in 2011 and designed to stand 2000 feet tall and include 150 floors, this new residential tower - currently under construction at 400 N. Lake Shore Drive - will soon be the tallest free-standing tower in North America and the tallest all-residential building in the world. The Chicago Spire will surpass Chicago's own Sears Tower, which stands 1450 feet tall, New York's upcoming Freedom Tower, planned to be 1776 feet tall, and Toronto's CN Tower, which stands 1815 feet tall.

Here is a link to the official Chicago Spire Web site: http://www.thechicagospire.com/

And here are links to two informational videos of the Chicago Spire:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNI37ncgdXQ
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpGsWa3kV8c

Be sure to check out the image gallery at http://www.thechicagospire.com/building/imagegallery/. Click on the FULLSCREEN link in the bottom right hand corner of the images to see them largest and best.

Artist's rendering of the Chicago Spire as it will be seen from Lake Michigan

Fascinating stuff, indeed!

Nathan Scheelhaase - new Illini football commitment

Another Juice Williams! GO ILLINI!



Two more videos are linked on the left side column; Segment #2 has the commitment announcement...
http://www.kcondemand.com/MetroSports.aspx

Chicago's "Cloud Gate" bean - COOL!!!

Photo by Dan O'Brien

Millennium Park's stainless steel "Cloud Gate" bean - what a cool sculpture!

For more details on the "Cloud Gate", check out http://gct13.com/e/20080312/chicago-bean and http://www.millenniumpark.org/artandarchitecture/cloud_gate.html.

2008 College World Series Bracket

This year's field of eight includes:
1. Miami, FL
2. North Carolina
3. Florida State
4. Rice
5. Georgia
6. LSU
7. Stanford
8. Fresno State

Bracket

UI would get 2.8% increase in funding

SPRINGFIELD – The state budget sent to Gov. Rod Blagojevich would give the University of Illinois $19.9 million more in operating funds next year, or a 2.8 percent increase.

That would help the university plug a $17 million gap in the $4.1 billion preliminary 2008-09 budget approved by UI trustees in late May. That budget, based on no additional state funding, showed $51 million in new income next year – mostly from tuition – but about $68 million in new costs.

"This is a little larger increase than last year. This certainly will be helpful to the university, there's no question about that," said Rick Schoell, UI executive director of governmental relations, trying to sort out budget details Saturday night.

UI would get 2.8% increase in funding

Homeless James Bond Part 2

"Bond. Vagabond. Homeless 007 is back again."

read more | digg story

Homeless James Bond 007

"This should be in theaters soon."

read more | digg story

A Limbaugh Analysis of Oil Prices

RUSH: Let me give you some more oil data here. Again, according to the US Department of Energy, US oil production has fallen approximately 40% since 1985, while US consumption has grown more than 30%. So in real barrels, US oil production is now below five million barrels a day. It was approximately nine million barrels a day in 1985. So in 23 years -- and see, it's happened slow. The market impact here has been slow, it's been gradual, but we've cut our production in half in 25 years -- and, by the way, can I ask you a question, folks? In doing that, in those 25 years, global warming's gotten worse, has it not? And in those 25 years the planet's gotten dirtier, has it not? According to what these people say. In the 25 years that we have stopped producing oil by half, we have cut our oil production in half, in 23 years; in those same 23 years the environmentalist wackos who are behind this keep telling us how rotten things are getting, how horrible things are getting, and we're destroying the environment; the polar bears, the planet, you name it.

We've been getting the blame for it! Yet we've cut our production in half. And you can see one of the results of this is the price that we're all paying for this stuff, oil-related products today. At the same time -- now, this is going to really frost you -- while in the last 23 years we have cut our production in half, the government has put billions of barrels of domestic oil and natural gas off limits to domestic exploration. According to federal government estimates, there is enough oil in the areas that we are now place off limits, 112 billion barrels to power more than 60 million cars for 60 years without importing a drop. It's off limits. The government, because of the environmentalists. So we're not producing this. We're not getting this. We've cut our own actual production in half in 25 years, and they still blame us for destroying the planet. We keep hearing about ANWR.

Had President Clinton not vetoed exploration in ANWR in 1995 -- oil was $19 a barrel in 1995 -- America would currently be receiving over a million barrels a day from Alaska. Experts estimate that ANWR contains 5.6 to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Okay, now at $123 a barrel -- and, by the way, ten years ago they said, "Well, it will take ten years to get the first drop. We can't do it." It's been ten years or more. We'd have had it, it would be online. Now they say, "It would be ten years if we start. We can't count on that." There are people, elected officials -- Democrats and some Republicans and entire members of the leftist environmentalist wacko organization -- who don't want this country to be energy sufficient and independent. The environmental movement in this country is largely comprised of -- the militant and wacko realm of it, consists of -- displaced communists and socialists who want this country down to size because it's not fair to everybody.

A Limbaugh Analysis of Oil Prices

YouTube video: "The Comcast Cable Guy Who Fell Asleep In My House"

NICE, Comcast!!! I'll stick with my AT&T DSL, thank you very much.

Gerry DiNardo Previews Illinois Football

Microsoft, Intel to build two college computing centers

Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. are giving a combined $20 million to build computing research centers at the University of Illinois and University of California.

The Universal Parallel Computer Research Centers (UPCRC) will attempt to accelerate development of parallel computing, which involves using multiple computer cores, or engines. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), for example, has worked on an 80-core research processor.

Officials at Redmond-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said multi-core processors represent a "revolution in the computer industry."

Microsoft, Intel to build two college computing centers