WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday will publicly propose giving bank regulators the power to limit the size of the nation’s largest banks and the scope of their risk-taking activities, an administration official said late Wednesday.

The president, for the first time, will throw his weight behind that approach and presumably ask that it be included in legislation now in Congress dealing with financial regulation.

He also would prohibit proprietary trading of financial securities by commercial banks, including mortgage-backed securities. Big losses in the trading of those securities precipitated the credit crisis in 2008 and the federal bailout.

Besides the question of what the president’s new space exploration plan might be, the next most important (or, at least, most frequently asked) questions have been when the plan will be announced and how much additional money the White House will request for NASA, at least in the FY2011 budget. We’re starting to get some hints as to what those answers might be, but they won’t necessarily be appealing to some space advocates.

Regarding when, White House senior advisor David Axelrod told the Orlando Sentinel that the plan will be released as part of the FY11 budget request, due out on February 1. “The president is going to speak to that through his budget,” Axelrod said. While some are hoping the president might reference those plans in his State of the Union address, scheduled for next Wednesday, Axelrod said Obama would not do a standalone speech, as President George W. Bush did when he announced the Vision for Space Exploration at NASA Headquarters in January 2004.

President Obama warned Democrats in Congress today not to "jam" a health care reform bill through now that they've lost their commanding majority in the Senate, and said they must wait for newly elected Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to be sworn into office.

Obama insisted today that the Senate wait for Brown to be seated before they make any changes to its version of the health care reform legislation.

"Here's one thing I know and I just want to make sure that this is off the table: The Senate certainly shouldn't try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated," the president said. "People in Massachusetts spoke. He's got to be part of that process."

By femaletrouble3:

Finally: contact. Humanity's ultimate question was answered.

A metallic sphere, roughly 3m in diameter, polished to a mirror. Nondescript otherwise except for an iridescent arrow indicating a recessed palm-sized red button.

The StarFreighter HMS Darwin approached the sphere and gently brought it aboard. The harbinger was "weighted", photographed and measured while the various crews of the armada impatiently paced and speculated.

Eventually came the day where the only thing left to do was push the palm-sized red button.

...

It took the light from the explosion four years to reach Earth.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a game which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

Terrorball, then, is an elaborate political game that seems irrational on its face – after all, it’s certain that more than 2.4 million Americans will die this year, and fairly likely that not even one of those deaths will be caused by terrorism -- but which features its own peculiar logic. That logic reflects the anxieties of those who have created its rules, and serves the interests of both terrorists and those who profit from exploiting the fear of terrorism.

Goldberg: Do you think it's only a matter of time before an airplane is blown up, or is this something that is still avoidable?

Schneier: The fact that we even ask this question illustrates something fundamentally wrong with how our society deals with risk. Of course 100% security is impossible; it has always been impossible and always will be. We'll never get the murder, burglary, or terrorism rate down to zero; 42,000 people will die each year in car crashes in the U.S. for the foreseeable future; life itself will always include risk. But that's okay. Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.

I want President Obama to get on national television and project indomitability. I want him to dial back the hyperbole, and remind us that our society can't be terrorized. I want him to roll back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise.

What the [true] conservative is about, in other words, is balance. And that's why Oakeshott's famous metaphor for the kind of politician he admired was a "trimmer." And one of his treasured works of political writing was Halifax's sadly neglected "The Character Of A Trimmer". Today we regard a trimmer as a flip-flopper. But a trimmer in the nautical sense was a man simply tasked with trimming the sails and balancing the weight of a ship to ensure, as different winds prevailed, that the ship stayed upright and on an even keel. The role of the conservative statesman is, in Oakeshott's sense, to do the same thing - sometimes expanding government in discrete ways to ameliorate or adjust to new circumstances; sometimes restricting it for the same reasons. Here's his own description:

"The 'trimmer' is one who disposes his weight so as to keep the ship upon an even keel. And our inspection of his conduct reveals certain general ideas at work...Being concerned to prevent politics from running to extremes, he believes that there is a time for everything and that everything has its time -- not providentially, but empirically. He will be found facing in whatever direction the occasion seems to require if the boat is to go even."

Speaking of the culture of celebrity and media saturation, an ironic aspect of the ridiculous levels of worshipful coverage that Brett Favre has gotten over the years is that it has made it eas(ier) to overlook that he's in the midst of one of the most amazing seasons in NFL history. His 24 TD passes, three interceptions, 69% completion percentage, and 270 yards per game passing add up to by far the highest quarterback rating of his career, and one of the highest in history. He's doing this at the age of 40, and today he tied Jim Marshall's record for consecutive NFL starts by a non-kicker (282).

{Arctic ice expert Dave} Barber spent the month of September on his annual tour of the Arctic basin aboard the research vessel Amundsen and his findings have been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal of the American Geophysical Union, the Geophysical Research Letters.