JJ's Blew Up!

Missouri Gas Energy said: "Early indications are that a contractor doing underground work struck a natural gas line, but the investigation continues."

I can't see any car accident from the CNN footage, but a car accident and a contractor makes at least 2 probable deaths right there. The walls of JJ's facing the street probably would be where people might be located, but firemen appear to keep hosing it down and not going through the immediate rubble. Crazy.

Bushes fault
-Leftnuts
#10 | Posted by Greatamerican at 2013-02-20 12:17 AM

www.sfgate.com"www.sfgate.com/a">Bush plays his deficit shell game
David Lazarus
Published 4:00 am, Friday, October 15, 2004

..
So let's recap: The Bush administration finds itself unable to operate within the boundaries of the highest debt ceiling in U.S. history, so its solution is to get by on other people's money until it can secure approval to run up even more debt.

Pro-growth policies indeed.

"It certainly highlights the disconnect between rhetoric and reality," said Harry Zeeve, national field director for the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budget watchdog group.

"The government is not living within its means," he said. "It's not unlike having to raise the limit on your credit-card account, and that's a dangerous thing. Eventually you'll have to pay a price for it."

Rising national debt reflects the cumulation of continuing annual deficits. It poses a risk of higher interest rates for everything from home mortgages to car loans.

Soaring national debt also represents a danger that the nation's creditors, including a number of foreign governments, will grow distrustful of our mounting IOUs and eventually ask for their money back.

In any case, Bush isn't the first president to exploit the $56 billion Government Securities Investment Fund, or G-Fund, for a little fiscal sleight of hand.

That honor, a Treasury Department spokeswoman told me, goes to the president's dad, George H.W. Bush, who tapped government workers' pension money in 1989 when confronted with a fast-approaching debt ceiling of $2.8 trillion.

President Bill Clinton did the same in 1996 when faced with a $4.9 trillion debt limit and a nasty budget battle with Congress

But the current occupant of the White House has made the most aggressive use of the tactic -- and required the most frequent increases in his administration's debt load.

According to the Treasury Department, Bush has had his Treasury secretary dip into the G-Fund every year for the past three years as government spending wildly exceeded revenues.

During this same period, Bush has pushed through a series of tax cuts while pursuing ambitious domestic and foreign-policy agendas, including two wars and an overhaul of the Medicare system.

"I don't know how seriously we can take Bush's attitude toward fiscal responsibility," said Alan Auerbach, an economist at UC Berkeley. "He has very little credibility on this issue."

In his letter to Congress, Snow vowed that all cash taken from the government pension fund eventually will be restored and that beneficiaries will feel "as if this temporary action had never taken place."

Meanwhile, the White House announced Thursday that the budget deficit this year totaled $413 billion, which is a record in dollar terms but not as a percentage of the overall economy.

Administration officials, with all the exuberance of a kid who got a D in algebra instead of an F, were quick to note that the $413 billion deficit is much better than the $521 billion shortfall they'd been forecasting earlier in the year. ..

Fixed the link:
Bush plays his deficit shell game