Traffic Patterns During National Cherry Blossom Festival

During the National Cherry Blossom Festival, the United States Park Police will implement a traffic pattern to facilitate the safe flow of traffic and mitigate congestion in the downtown Washington area.

Saturday March 28 2009, at about 5:00am, all traffic into West and East Potomac Park will enter from Maine Avenue at East Basin Drive.

Traffic in East Potomac Park, generally the Haines Point area, will flow normally.

Traffic in West Potomac Park will be substantially altered in that Ohio Drive along the Potomac River will flow northbound only. As such, there will be no access into West Potomac Park from 23rd Street and Independence Avenue.

This traffic pattern will remain for the entire National Cherry Blossom Festival.

As always, parking is limited and visitors are encouraged to use public transportation with the Smithsonian and Foggy Bottom Stations being the nearest to the activities.

The most convenient parking areas will be the A, B, and C lots along Ohio Drive Potomac River side in the area of the 14th Street Bridge. Additionally, there will be parking on Haines Point and limited parking in West Potomac Park on Ohio Drive along the Potomac River.

Handicapped parking is available on the west curb of Ohio Drive in the area of the Tennis Bubble, the north and south curbs of West Basin Drive adjacent to the FDR Memorial. There are also handicapped spaced at various locations throughout the parking areas.

There will be a free bicycle valet parking program on April 3rd and 4th from 9:00 am until 7:00 pm on the south side of the Jefferson Memorial.

Tourmobile will offer a free Cherry Tree viewing shuttle from the Jefferson Memorial around Haines Point with nine stops along the route.

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Blogging While High Ep 5: What's with Twitter users?

This Blogging While High episode was brought to you by NYC Diesel.
Read Blogging While High Ep 4: I Miss the Muppets
Note: This post inspired by Five people I am no longer following on Twitter @ These Digital Times

Intro

My 30 day marijuana hiatus is up [link]. It was up since Sunday, March 22. But, I admit, I rationalized my way to a day short. Yup. If I count the day I decided to start to March 22nd, it would have been 30 days. However, and this is where the rationalization comes from, I include the time before I started in which I didn't smoke any weed, which amounts to a period of 2-3 days, I really did 31-32 days, since I only did 29. At any rate, I was off for 30 days and that's what it is. I win. Nyaaaaah.

Strain Report: NYC Diesel

It was ok. The smell was pretty potent as I could smell it from my pocket while I was at the store. It felt good in my hand - firm but not rock hard, kind of fluffy. It looked really good when I finally got home. It even tasted good.

However, I've had better NYC Diesel. I don't think it was as strong as it should have been. I think the buds were possibly screened before packaging because when I pulled out the microscope, a lot of the heads were missing but even inside the buds when I cracked them open.

Let's Talk: Twitter

What is Twitter? Easy answer.

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages." [Twitter]

However, you've got folks that go even deeper to explain Twitter better than Twitter. [About] Here's a lengthy account that basically expands the hell out of that definition like a synopsis of an Art of War passage. That's a semi-high brow joke for you people who only read Eric Jerome Dickey.. yeah you! LOL.

However, I feel almost bombarded by these social media folks that, I think, has redefined how twitter is used. Their way is careless and wild. They have no integrity. I think that's what might be ruining twitter. The problem is, of course, greed. People want to be followed the most. People always want something. I don't think folks should feel they have to follow someone else.

I suggest folks follow who they want to hear from. Also, we followers need to not be upset if someone doesn't follow us. Don't worry about your twitter ranking. It's irrelevent. Increase the integrity of those that follow you.

Truth is, I know people are following me just because I am following them. And I am following people just because they are following me. Most, I genuinely have an interest. But, they aren't interesting at all. Right now, I follow 340 people and 405 people follow me. I am knocking 5 people off my list right now. They are

1. Chris Moody, @chris_moody, is just boring but he's the manager of New Media at the Cato Institute [@catoinstitute] which is pretty cool to follow.
2. Evan Williams, @ev, is also boring and the CEO of Twitter.
3. Terry Ng, @kineda, is a link pusher... ahhhhh. Everything is a link. Booooo. GO OUTSIDE. But, I do keep his site on hand. I just go to it about once a month.
4. THERUNDOWN, @therundown, is another link pusher. I've already got an RSS Reader.
5. Just Salad, @justsalad, is a spot in NYC that serves just salad. Get it? Just Salad. Anyway, I love green flora but not that much. I'm a red meat eater anyway. "Where's the beed?" I've always said if PETA ever gets animal as food concept banned or criminalized in some way, I will eat a PETA member. I figure if I am going to break the law, I might as well try human!

Anyway, I think this is what we should all do. Look on your list and just remove 5 people from it that you know you probably never cared to follow in the first place. I hope it's not me though. I'd think folks loved me. LOL

Do you have any good follow or following rules that you use to maintain the integrity of your list??

Edit: Make sure you follow me on twitter @anthonytaurus!

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MASTERS OF DECEIT:

TODAY, I am starting a new series that may be a two or four part piece. I don't know exactly yet, because I am still writing it. Due to the seriousness of this piece, I shall dispense with my usual jokes at the top of each blog, because I want people to concentrate on the seriousness of the information I will be putting forth. I am bi-partisan in this post in that I excoriate both parties.

I will leave it up to each of you to decide for yourselves as to the veracity of the information.

Each part in this series will remain up for three days. Today starts Part I:

MASTERS OF DECEIT:

Sadly, Barack Hussein Obama is NOT who or what he appears to be. Only a small percentage of American people are aware, on a deep and spiritual level, of whom and what he really is. Obama is merely a cruel hoax perpetrated on the American people. He is a useful idiot, a pawn of the Wall Street minions who really rule this country, plain and simple.

Politics has an awful lot in common with pro-wrestling, in that in front of the cameras they wrestlers appear to be enemies and hate each other, but behind the scenes, they are best buds and they love each other. So it is with the Democrat and the Republican politicians. In the public political arena, they appear to go after each other, but that is just for show, for public consumption. Behind the scenes they are one and the same, comrades in arms. They attend fancy parties together, go on golfing outings, and have dinner together. Left and Right mean nothing. The only question that really matters is, "Do you work for Wall Street or are you trying to protect the American people from the money grabbers?"

It should be obvious by now that there are some pretty huge money interests pulling the strings NOT only of our government, but almost all the governments of the world. They have it set up that they can donate millions of dollars to the various political campaigns, so how can we the people expect not to have things go against us?

In 2008, America was desperate for a change, since the past eight years under G.W. Bush, turned out to be a disaster. Bush claimed to be a Conservative, but he tripled the size of the federal government, he started to shred the Constitution of the United States and destroyed the image of America around the world.. Endless wars, over a million dead Iraqis, and more than 5,000 dead U.S. troops. The Patriot Act, warrant less wiretapping and domestic spying. The end of Posse Comitatis, the rise of the treasonous North American Union, a deepening recession sliding toward complete economic collapse. These factors along with other abuses had the citizens of America in a state of panic concerning their futures and that of the United States.

The elite were in serious trouble because we the people were beginning to see through their facade, past their front man to the elite behind the throne. For the first time in U.S. history, the Democrats and the Republicans were hated equally. Congress had a 9% approval rating and the globalist agenda had come to standstill, and then suddenly on to the scene appeared an unknown man who promised change, "Change we all could believe in."

Barack Hussein Obama promised to end the Iraq war and bring our troops home fast. He promised to uphold the Constitution and stop the federal government from spying on the American people. He told the American workers he was going to get them out of NAFTA and GATT, and he is already breaking those promises.

Obama has resumed the security and prosperity talks with Mexico and Canada, leading to a North American Union, a process started by Bill Clinton and picked up by G.W. Bush. Obama has proved himself to be the consummate liar. He promises one thing and then turns around and does the direct opposite. He works for the very same elite that ALL presidents, starting with Woodrow Wilson, worked for. The very same elite who are engineering the financial collapse of the United States, and the formation of a dictatorial world government.

If we are to have any hope of effecting real change for the better, it cannot come from the Madison Avenue image makers or MSM whores, who have promoted Barack Obama as the savior of the world. In order to alter our present course from tyranny to liberty, in order to defeat the corrupt elite we must get passed their puppets and confront the REAL power structure of the world.

Ever since President George H.W. Bush began talking about a "New World Order", before the United Nations in 1990, many people became confused about what was going on. The term 'NEW WORLD ORDER' is a more palatable name for the "ANGLO-AMERICAN WORLD EMPIRE" which is the planetary domination by London, Washington and New York over the rest of the world. It would be hard to get people to sign on to it if you called it the "ANGLO-AMERICAN WORLD EMPIRE", but if you call it the New World Order, people would be eager to sign on because they will think that there is something in it for them. In reality, it is the "OLD WORLD ORDER", it is the British Empire morphing into the American Empire, and so what you will get is the ANGLO-AMERICAN EMPIRE.

People that have a modicum of knowledge know that the battle that America has been waging since its inception is for the central bankers NOT to take over this country, which is why people like Andrew Jackson were elected, and it is the reason why Americans admire people like Thomas Jefferson. But the take-over has happened, it is a corporate take-over.

Agents of the Bank of England attempted to assassinate Andrew Jackson on multiple occasions because of his resistance to a private central bank being set up in the United States. It was something that Abraham Lincoln warned against, which is what I believe was the reason he was assassinated. Lincoln said, "The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. They are more despotic then a monarchy, more insulate then autocracy, more selfish then bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated into a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Wall Street has killed Main Street.

Up until the assassination of President Kennedy and the beginning of the war in Vietnam, America was a very powerful engine for world progress. It was the Kennedy assassination and the beginning of the Vietnam War that was also the beginning of the Wall Street domination over every other interest. No body else counts except the Wall Street money masters. This has made the United States no longer a force for progress but something totally different, often a force of destruction in the world.

The military/industrial complex has taken over the country along with the the Wall Street thugs. If you take a look at the people that Obama has appointed to his cabinet, they are all Wall Street, ours is a government by Wall Street, of Wall Street and for Wall Street. There is no body from heavy industry, no body from the automobile industry, no body from Silicon Valley, no body from big oil, nobody from defense, no labor, no small business, no retirees, they are all pure Wall Street. The only people who have a voice in Obama's administration are Wall Street finance oligarchs. No body else counts for anything under the Obama administration. This is the most pro-Wall Street administration that this country has ever seen.

Just before his death, President Woodrow Wilson apologized to the American people, telling them that he regreted that he had been deceived by a bunch of international bankers and that the country's financial system had fallen, via the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, into the hands of those bankers. Even President Dwight David Eisenhower warned the people that the military/industrial complex was taking over the country. Only three years after leaving office, Eisenhower's warning concerning the threat posed to our system of government by the military/industrial complex came to pass.

President John F. Kennedy totally enraged the entire elite network. Kennedy was actually groomed and brought in by the elite as some one whom they could manipulate, a puppet to the Wall Street oligarchs, who assumed that his pro-Nazi father, Joseph P. Kennedy, a bootlegger and speculator, would gurantee that John Kennedy would be obedient to the elite establishment, and they thought that he was a sex-maniac and they could use that as blackmail to keep him in line. But, they were mistaken because due to his personal suffering, Kennedy had discovered a personal sense of himself which went beyond just being a puppet. He was thinking about economic recovery and world peace, instituting a space program, cutting the Federal Reserve down to size, and implementing deals with the Soviet Union.

Executive Order #1110, signed by President Kennedy, began the process of abolishing the private Federal Reserve. Kennedy was also pushing for REAL Civil Rights reform, and he even began the process of pulling American troops out of Vietnam. The last time the United States had an ACTUAL President, not a puppet, was President Kennedy. The oligarchs could not stand that, so they took quick and decisive action. When John Kennedy attempted to take the government back from the Wall Street elite, he was murdered in a brutal fashion for the entire world to see, and the message sent to ALL future presidents and other world leaders was loud and clear, "DO AS YOU ARE TOLD OR DIE."



Part II will be posted Sunday night, March 29th.

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2009 Uncirculated Lincoln Commemorative Wait List

This afternoon the 2009 Abraham Lincoln Commemorative Uncirculated Silver Dollar went on "waiting list" status. The Proof version of the coin remains available for sale without the waiting list notice.

The message on the Uncirculated coin's product page in part states the following:

The number of orders we have taken meets the maximum limit for the 2009 Abraham Lincoln Commemorative Uncirculated Silver Dollar. You may still place an order for his product, which will go on a waiting list. If a product becomes available due to an order cancellation, we will fulfill orders from the waiting list on a first-in, first-served basis.

As posted over the weekend, combined sales through March 15, 2009 was 423,451, bringing the total very close to the 450,000 individual sales needed to reach a sell out. The maximum mintage for the 2009 Lincoln Commemorative is actually 500,000, but 50,000 have been reserved for a special 5 Coin Proof Set to be released this summer.

The maximum authorized mintage does not specify separate maximums for the proof and uncirculated versions of the coins. The breakdown is generally determined based on demand from customer orders. As a practical matter, the US Mint probably must determine an allocation for the final production runs in advance of the actual sell out.

The proof version of the Lincoln Commemorative has sold more than twice as many coins as the uncirculated version. When the additional 50,000 proof coins to be included in the special set are considered, the final proof mintage might be close to triple the uncirculated coin's mintage. For some past commemorative coin issues, the uncirculated coin which was less popular during the sales period eventually became more expensive on the secondary market due to the lower mintage.

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2009 Presidential $1 Coin Uncirculated Set

The US Mint will offer the 2009 Presidential Dollar Uncirculated Coin Set on April 2, 2009 at 12:00 Noon ET.

This set will include one uncirculated coin from the Philadelphia and Denver Mint for each of the 2009 Presidential Dollar Coins. In past sets, the coins have been the satin finish versions of the Presidential Dollars found in Mint Sets, as opposed to regular circulation strikes. The eight coins come in a custom holder which includes biographical sketches of each President.

The following coins will be included:

2009 P & D William Henry Harrison Presidential Dollars
2009 P & D John Tyler Presidential Dollars
2009 P & D James K. Polk Presidential Dollars
2009 P & D Zachary Taylor Presidential Dollars

Collectors can actually obtain these eight coins in the full 2009 Uncirculated Mint Set, which is currently scheduled to be released by the US Mint in the summer. It's generally a better value to buy the full annual set, however the US Mint sells a surprisingly large number of the separate Presidential Dollar Uncirculated Sets. To date, they have sold over 75,000 units of the 2008 set, which still remains on sale at the time of writing this post.

The sets are priced at $15.95 each and the US Mint's product page can be found here, although ordering options won't be available until the start of sales.

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NATIONAL SOCIALISM ON ITS WAY TO AMERICA

THE HOUSE HAS ADOPTED PLANS FOR OBAMA'S "VOLUNTEER CORPS":

As America abandons its moral absolutes and its Judeo/Christian principles, our government is moving ever closer to a Nazi style totalitarian type of government. You don't believe it? Read on:

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved plans to take the first step toward Obama's "National Civilian Security Force," by approving a plan to set up a new "volunteer corp" and they will consider whether a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people should be developed.

The legislation will also call for a uniform to be worn by the "volunteers", and the need for a "public service academy," which will be a four year institution to focus on training future public sector leaders (can you say: 'Community Organizers'.). This training will take place on "campuses." This will be funded by an allocation of $6 billion dollars over the next five years, paid by us, the taxpayers, on top of the trillions of dollars that Obama has already saddled us with.

This is to be the beginning of what Obama calls his "NATIONAL CIVILIAN SECURITY FORCE" that would be well-armed and bigger then the U.S. Military, (Can you Gestapo, SS, Secret police?).

The new bill references the possibility that "all individuals in the United States will be expected to perform a certain amount of national service, as this would "Strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges (quash civilian decent - silence the voice of those who disagree with the government) by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds." Nobody except infants will be excluded.

With the stroke of a pen, 'volunteerism' that has been a mainstay of America since our founding will be wiped out with the stroke of a pen. Volunteerism will become forced labor as it was in Germany of another era, and American citizens of all ages and creeds will be pressed, without their knowledge, into military service.

Check out Obama's words in the following video:




WAKE UP AMERICA, YOUR FUTURE IS AT STAKE!

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2009 Coin Production

The current economic situation has caused a slow down in commercial activity and brought many long hoarded coins back into circulation. As a result, production figures for new coins are down dramatically. It's a frequent observation that recessions produce key date coins, will this hold true for the current cycle?

The table below lists the 2009 coin production figures published by the US Mint for the first two months of the year. Some denominations have the separate designs split out (such as the quarters). In the past, once a figure had been posted for an individual design, this has represented the final production number. The figures for the static designs (and the Lincoln Cent which has not been separated by design) continue to increase as new months are reported.

2009 Coin Production (Jan 2009 - Feb 2009)
	Philadelphia	Denver
Lincoln Cent	194.40 M	342.40 M
Jefferson Nickel	23.04 M	30.24 M
Roosevelt Dime	67.50 M	41.50 M
District of Columbia Quarter	83.60 M	88.80 M
Puerto Rico Quarter	53.00 M	86.00 M
Kennedy Half	1.70 M	1.70 M
Native American Dollar	7.28 M	0.70 M
William Henry Harrison Dollar	43.26 M	55.16 M

While the numbers are uniformly low, there are a few figures that are of particular interest. The Lincoln Cent figure might represent a comparatively huge decline from prior years. Last year, each Mint produced more than 2.5 billion cents. If the figures above represent the total production for the "Birth and Early Childhood" design, this would be just a fraction of the usual cent mintage. Availability of the 2009 Lincoln Cent continues to be sporadic, except for the US Mint offering, which already pegs the value at $4.50 per roll.

The Jefferson Nickel and Roosevelt Dime figures will be figures to watch as we move further into the year. If the numbers above are annualized, the final mintages will have a drop of about 50% from the prior year levels. More importantly, I think these two denominations are much less likely to be saved by collectors since they are overshadowed by this year's quarters and pennies. The availability of BU circulation strikes for this year might eventually be very limited.

The figures for the first two quarters from the District of Columbia & US Territories Quarters Program represent a sharp drop from the production figures for the prior State Quarters series. Last year, each mint produced roughly 200 - 250 million of each quarter. The lowest mintage for the entire State Quarters series was the Oklahoma Quarter with 194.6 Million. The figures above indicate that the 2009-D Puerto Rico Quarter has a production of only 53 million. A circulating quarter has not had a mintage this low since 1962.

One thing to note about the figures. They seem to represent coin production for coins minted during 2009. It's possible that the US Mint produced 2009-dated coins during December 2008, which may be included in the prior year numbers. This is particularly evident for the Native American Dollars figure- the prior year figure experienced a huge jump in December, which seems to be attributable to 2009 Native American Dollars produced rather than an extra run of 2008 Sacagawea Dollars. For this reason, some of the production figures might not translate directly into the final mintages.

Nevertheless, there will most likely be some very low mintage 2009 coins when all is said and done. It won't be easy, but if you can acquire fresh rolls of 2009 coins from your bank at face value and put them away, I think you will be rewarded down the road.

I will follow up on the 2009 coin production situation as we move through the year, but you can also track the numbers directly on the US Mint's website here.

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