Today’s Lesson Regarding Government Subsidized Private Schools.
“School vouchers save public schools money”. Really?
Let’s use Senator Johnson’s estimate of about 5% of public school parents using his government funded subsidy to enroll in a private school and let’s use a typical elementary school with about 600 students. Finally let’s use his $5,000 per child estimate of government funding moving from public to private schools.
If 5% of 600 students leave our example public school, that means around 30 students will take about $150,000 from public school funding. Oh, but you say, look at the savings the public school will reap. What savings? Thirty students represent less than one fewer student per clasroom in our example school – no reduction in teacher personnel at this school nor any reduction in costs associated with teachers.
Will these 30 students leaving reduce the operational cost of this school? I don’t think it will cost any less to heat and cool the building, do you? How about maintaining and cleaning the building? Me either.
If 60% of these 30 students are transported to and from school, will these 18 fewer students result in a reduction in the number of buses needed or the cost to operate the buses?
Exactly where will the school system savings come from to offset the loss of $150,000 funding? When I posed this question to my state representative, she said that 30 students was the equivalent of two teachers. That would ONLY be true if ALL 30 STUDENTS that chose to move to a private school somehow happened to be from the same grade level and, in the unlikely event of this happening, this would reduce the teacher allotment of our example school by only one teacher. My state representative said she had not thought of that but she supported school vouchers anyway because “that’s want the voters want”.
Well, Jim, you sound very wise as usual. I cannot get excited over someone else filling in for you part of each week. This will always be YOUR blog.
But, as always, the suggestion is that CHANGE is good. I’m not so sure about that. Sometimes maybe. Sometimes not. I look at Washington and wonder. That does not put me in the mood for any more change at the moment.
Enjoy your time off, Jim, but don’t stay too long on the farm. You might turn into a real redneck and we don’t need that here. The present one is more than enough.
Congrats on the new format. Conservatives will be holding forth day and night so we will have lotsa good sense spread around. I’m for that!!
I’d like to start off your new blog with a simple question. Why don’t we cut the salary of congress and make them get their own health care insurance. They are surely not earning what we are paying them and a little dose of the real world rather than being treated like royaltiy would be good for them.
I spent Friday at my sister’s house playing bridge with her club. The main topic of conversation was how much the Masters is off this year. The current going rate for a badge is only $1,500. If you have always wanted to go this could be the lowest cost trip in many years.
I cannot say I am happy about this change in any way, other than happy if this is what *you* want.
I cannot imagine how someone is going to pick up this mantel and be able to carry on the width and breadth of what you do. There are lots of potential writers who can research a given subject and formulate a position. What has distinguished you over the years is that conservative thought comes from your soul–from the core. I would be willing to bet that you rarely research a position, but may look up some detailed statistics. I suggest your positions on topics, both political and other–comes to you naturally and without much mental machination of what your position is. It is already— there!
How do you find that capability? How do you qualify for “it”? How do you prove you have “it”?
I hope we hear from you frequently. Enjoy fishing, golfing, or whatever it is you do when you don’t do this.
Wooten, your dated and backward thinking is the biggest reason why the GOP will be in the minority for years. Now you’re the typical white haired codger who has nothing better to do than sit around and complain about everything. Your opinion is stale and irrelevant. Sure, go ahead and preach theory that died with Eisenhower, but where were you while Bush was presiding over the core of all this mess? All of the vaunted conservative jargon went out the window.
“The radicals stay radical; the conseratives stay conservative.”
Another subtle form of brainwashing by Jim is when he juxtaposes the word “radical” next to word “conservative”. Typically liberals and conservatives are at the opposite ends of political philsophy, so he’s subtly having you belive all liberals are radicals, which is not true. “Fixed News” uses a lot of those techniques.
Bank of America is investigating how Merrill Lynch accounted for
wayward trades in the final, frantic months of 2008 — and why at least
one $120 million trading loss was slow to appear on Merrill’s books,
The New York Times reported.
Of particular concern are the activities of a Merrill currency trader
in London, Alexis Stenfors, whose trading has come under scrutiny by
British regulators, The Times said, citing people briefed on the
investigation. The loss Mr. Stenfors is believed to have incurred so
alarmed Bank of America, which acquired Merrill early this year, that
this week the bank examined the books of other traders who were on
vacation.
In a statement Friday, Merrill said it had uncovered an “irregularity”
during a review of its trading operations and is working with
authorities to investigate further.
“Senior managers of the business are focused on the issue and believe
the risks surrounding possible losses are under control,” Merrill said.
Well, don’t think I didn’t catch that snide remark, Sister Dusty. It wasn’t very Christian of you.
It’s real bad news this new Conservative writter could be a lawyer. We already got one of them here. Raghead is always the first in the a.m. and his first one is longer than anything Wooten writes. If the AJC is going to hire a lawyer to do the writting, better get the thing set up to handle a book. Then you can wait till the p.m. to get any posts from the readers.
Wait–a real bad thought just come to me. The new Conservative writter could be Raghead hisself. We’ll know if his first rant is about the Capital Gains Tax and Dr. Sowell.
Anyhow, I guess I wish Wooten a happy retirement. He was never Conservative enough for me but he was about the best one out of a real sorry bunch there at the AJC. Have a good day everybody.
The faithful contend that Rush is NOT the leader and that any talk otherwise is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit the hemorrhaging GOP.
Yet…of ALL of the people listed, he is number two.
Things that make you go hmmmmmm…
More than two-thirds of all Republicans feel their party has no clear leader, according to a national survey by Rasmussen Reports. That compares to just 10 percent of Democrats who say their party is leaderless.
The survey comes in the context of Democrats’ efforts to portray talk-host Rush Limbaugh as the party’s head man.
Other results from the Rasmussen survey of 1,000 adults:
Just 5 percent think presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the party’s leader. RNC Chairman Michael Steele also wins 5 percent. About 2 percent of Republicans say talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh is the GOP’s top dog. That compares to 7 percent of Democrats who see him in that role.
Sarah Palin shows up in the survey, but only 1 percent identify her as the party’s leader, however.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner are tied in the leadership department. For each, one half of 1 percent selected either McConnell or Boehner as the leader of the GOP.
Overall, 68 percent of Republicans say the GOP currently has no clear leader.
You and I are on very sides of the political equation, but, I can offer you the best of wishes with your retirement and further extend a hand to one of my fellow Viet-Nam vets. CONGRATS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, let us pose the question regarding the economy and the approach the Repubs have taken. Being obstructionist has not and will not work. Even some of their own constituents are suffering dreadfully.
Have you noticed that none of the Repubs have offered an alternative to the plan currently proposed except to say that we are spending too much and spending is not stimulative.
Can someone PLEASE help those folks out with definitions and rational thought process. They say if we spend too much today, we will pay for with out childrens and grandchildrens taxes. My reply to that, if we do not have jobs to pay for food, housing and clothing, what children are they talking about?
I am not in favor of any of these attempts at the Gold Dome to “increase revenues,” i.e. raise taxes. What those jacklegs need to do is cut spending, like all the rest of us are doing. Now, please.
I made no “snide” remark about you. I was perfectly honest which is the Christian way of doing things. I did not want Jim to get out in the hot sun too long while he’s at the farm. He might think HE drives a beer truck.
No undercover stuff for me like you-kno-who writes all the time. But you are good for a laugh. ‘Tis true and I say that little lie quite honestly.
To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if there’s a rule, there’s been a problem.
They don’t chain up the leather jackets at Dillard’s to protect the inventory from the honest people.
Maybe the elderly who see requiring photo IDs as an affront to their honesty should request that banks not check ID when people come in bearing checks written on their accounts.
I really like the new format, Jim! Very legible and intuitive.
Would any of you care to speculate as to President Obama’s motive for snubbing Gordon Brown repeatedly during the British Prime Minister’s recent state visit? London is furious. Obama refused to host a state dinner for our great ally, and while the PM presented the President with a proper gift of state, a statue of Churchill, the President in turn gave the Queen’s First Minister 25 DVDs of old movies, including “The Wizard of Oz” and “Psycho”. Instead of dispatching a special envoy to London to apologize, Obama’s State Department issued a statement to the effect that Great Britain is of no greater importance to the U.S. than is any other member of the United Nations.
Why did Obama snub Brown? Simple–his experience as a community agitator didn’t prepare him for the job. Whether handling the niceties of hosting our most important ally or dealing with the stumbling economy, Obama is not up to the job. Obama was given a pen made from the wood of the HMS Resolute–the same ship from which Obama’s desk was built. And Obama gives PM Brown DVDs that won’t even play in the U.K. Obama really demonstrated his cultural awareness and sensitivity, didn’t he?
Didn’t Obama tell us that he would smooth things over with our friends and foes alike? That he possesses a special understanding of how to deal with people of all cultures (because he lived in Kenya for a while)? Obama has treated Syria with more respect than either Great Britain or Israel–which is not a surprise to many of us.
Americans are paying a terrible price simply to prove that we are “fair-minded” people. The Dow dropped 80 more points today. Peoples’ retirements are in jeopardy. And folks are getting rightfully angry.
Any Obama supporters sorry you voted for the man? Or do you hate Republicans more than you love freedom and capitalism?
Dear Glenn @ 5:15, I suspect The Empty Suit is unaware that he insulted a former ally. Change we can believe in. As to the new look on the blog, I have reservations – I perceive there are no cookies and I will have to actually learn how to spell “Ragnar Danneskjöld.”
“Those who don’t live by the laws they impose should be gon.” Is that true Wooten? Well you can substitute priciples for laws, and that would explain the republicans very well. That want to preach (not those republicans)about being fiscally prudent while running up a massive debt for 6 years (democrats ran Congress for two years).
The druggie Limbaugh wing of your party is delusional Wooten. The man has been president for 45 days and you’re already hoping he fails. Now thats patriotism. If he indeed does, which Raghead, Musty Dusty, and @@-hole so desperately want, there isn’t anyone in the republican party to lead the country back. Funny how in 8 years, you couldn’t find one fault of George Bush, but have been one of the harshest critics of Obama a mere 45 days in. Even George Will, David Brooks, and other at least gave him a chance, your retirement can’t come soon enough Wooten.
P.S.- I had to write late to beat Raghead’s thesis paper first thing in the morning. He might as well be Wooten, he agrees with him on everything. Just like a little brother follows big brother around.
Much ado about nothing! There is no evidence of extensive voter fraud in Georgia. Those who advocate burdening the poor and the elderly with unneeded rules and laws do so for the pleasure of inconveniencing the poor and elderly, not for solving an election problem.
The Associated Press
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Attorneys for U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss are heading to court in Savannah to fight a subpoena by an attorney suing Imperial Sugar.
Chatham County Superior Court Judge Herman W. Coolidge is scheduled to hear arguments from attorneys Tuesday.
Savannah lawyer Mark Tate wants to question Chambliss about whether company executives asked the senator to help it avoid blame in the February 2007 explosion at its Georgia refinery in Port Wentworth.
Senate lawyers argue Chambliss is immune from submitting to a deposition under the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution, which shields members of Congress from testifying about legislative business in lawsuits.
Sixty-eight percent of Republican voters say their party has no clear leader, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey released Monday. Another 17 percent are undecided.
Just 5 percent view either Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential candidate, or new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele as the party’s leader. Two percent see conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh in that role, and 1 percent name McCain’s former running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio are each seen as the GOP leader by less than one-half of 1 percent.
Good morning all. Many elements worthy of discussion:
(1) One is stricken that laws putting people into jail require only a majority vote, but changes to ethics rule, to allow sanction for misbehavior, require a 2/3s vote. Suggests that our overlords need special privileges.
(2) One is stricken by the unrecorded vote on the rules change. Mr. Cagle’s decision – to mask the vote – allows plausible deniability to those rascals who seek to circumvent scrutiny of their affairs.
(3) I don’t think I know Mr. Brown, but there is an element of disingenuity in his speech, as described by our genial host. The crowd reaction sounds more like rubber-neckers gawking at a car wreck rather than specific honor to brilliant oratory.
(4) Surely there are some republicans who failed to pay their taxes also? I would hope that we are not talking about instances of disputed amounts – the usual and legitimate tax disputes over “what is income” – but rather that we are talking about willful non-filers? I have represented many in good faith tax disputes, and I hope the legislature was not magnifying the genius of the bureaucrats who mistakenly misinterpret the statutes from time to time.
For benefit of friend Redneck, my curiously related morning rant, on the bill before Congress today:
As our Congress debates the home owner bailout bill today, Dr. Sowell asks the simple question, “why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?” Our leftist overlords have determined that taxpayers are obliged to help those having trouble paying mortgages up to $725,000.
Dr. Sowell also asks, “Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand– for the very good reason that he could not afford it– why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?” Leftists have a long tradition of being compassionate with other people’s money, so the new debt taxpayers are taking on, for benefit of the friends of Nancy, is unsurprising.
One begins to wonder, “what is beyond the pale?” Is there no non-defense spending so stupid that leftists will not support it? When Americans voted for “change” last November, they were not voting for higher taxpayer subsidies of the indolent. Americans did not hold as a high priority “destruction of the greatest health care system in the world.” (Ok, there are a few Obamaniacs who would travel to Cuba or Canada to get a heart transplant, except they would die while on the waiting list.)
Quite the opposite, the change most often cited by our leftist friends during the campaign was a desire to get away from “deficits” and “earmarks.” Almost sounds like a sick joke now, does it not, given the bill in debate before Congress today? Of course, most people who lament deficits or earmarks have no idea of the magnitude of evil arising from various economics terms.
“Earmarks” are opprobrium, not because of the adverse economic effect of the spending, but because they are a circumvention of the legislative process. An earmark is nothing more than spending inserted at a last legislative minute by one who is politically connected, to ensure the nature of the spending is not thoughtfully considered by his fellow legislators. It is the Congressional equivalent of a teen yelling as he goes out the door, “I’m going out and I took $20 from your wallet, Dad.”
“Budget Deficits” (like the similarly vacuous “trade deficits”) are a nearly-meaningless accounting construct, merely the measure of the difference between revenues and disbursements. As Congress has a poor track record in estimating both, biased to understate the “deficit,” our indignation at the imbalance has a weak and constantly changing foundation. While deficits of volition, i.e., deficits not required in response to any national emergency, have soared under President Obama, the deficit itself – any deficit – is not particularly a problem. Deficits do have consequences over the long term, in that the accumulation of debt results in rising interest rates. On balance, however, higher interest rates are less damaging to the overall economy than a tax increase for the same amount.
“Non-defense spending” is the great unspoken evil of government. This spending is a measure of the amounts that overlords appropriate from the citizenry, not to protect the citizenry, but rather to spend on the arbitrary and uneconomic preferences of the overlords. It is an excellent proxy for “erosion of freedom” and “thievery at the highest levels.” If one really wishes to calculate the evil done by the overlords, one need not look further than this single concept, both the total level and the annual change. It is time for us to change our focus – change that can do an informed voter some good.
Jim, I’d love to hear your comments on state republicans working to bring back sales taxes on GROCERIES! Are you kidding me? They can’t pass a law to allow counties to voluntarily decide via referendum whether or not they want Sunday retail liquor sales, and then they pitch this mess at us?! Any bum that votes for the return of state taxes on groceries should be thrown out of the state legislature without a second thought.
As a fiscal conservative, I can’t see that either major political party “gets it”.
With the democrats, you get what you see. Tax and spenders for social gain and improvement.
With the republicans, I really believe what you get is what you can’t see.
Let’s take earmarks for example. This is where I am just about ready to throw in the towel with this bunch of republicans. Most republican members of Congress voted for President Bush’s eight budgets, all of which increased spending and the nation’s debt. All of which had wasteful earmarks. Then they lost big time in November.
Now they pledge that they won’t keep making those mistakes. So what do they do? They insert billions of dollars of earmarks in President Obama’s first budget and THEN TURNAROUND AND CRITIZE THE PRESIDENT FOR WASTEFUL SPENDING!! They rail against him (rightfully so) for going back on his promise to rail in the practice of earmarking but cede the high ground of this arguement by earmarking!
Both sides rail against the wasteful salaries and corporate jets of big business but continue to earmark. This is where neither side “gets it”. Its not necessarily the money in earmarks and salaries, it’s the symbolism that both represent.
I can’t support the democrats and their wasteful spending but I sure can’t support the republicans and their wasteful spending and their failure to realize that continuing to do and act as they have for the last eight years is no plan to regain the majority.
If there were congressional elections this year, I would probably sit out the election. I just don’t see a viable option when it comes to federal spending.
40% of the earmarks in the budget bill are for Republicans. Both of our Socialist Senators woved AGAINST stripping out the earmarks. Saxby said he would make a difference in congress, sure for the LOBBYIST that pay him.
Republicans don’t cut taxes on average individuals, just on corporations and the unearned income of the elite. Republicans RAISE taxes on middle class working people. Look at the taxes they are raising: property taxes on people’s homes and sales taxes on groceries. Anyone who votes republican because they “cut taxes” is officially a friggin’ moron.
To stay on topic here, anyone in a legislative role who continually doesn’t pay their taxes should be ousted. Bottom line, doesn’t matter what party they’re in or what color their skin is.
The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems, but let’s face it, the current Republican response is totally misguided. The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate.
The G.O.P. leaders have adopted a posture that allows the Democrats to make all the proposals while all the Republicans can say is “no.” They’ve apparently decided that it’s easier to repeat the familiar talking points than actually think through a response to the extraordinary crisis at hand.
If the Republicans wanted to do the country some good, they’d embrace an entirely different approach.
First, they’d take the current economic crisis more seriously than the Democrats. The Obama budget projects that the recession will be mild this year and the economy will come surging back in 2010. Democrats apparently think that dealing with the crisis is a part-time job, which leaves the afternoons free to work on long-range plans to reform education, health care, energy and a dozen smaller things. Democrats are counting on a quick recovery to help pay for these long-term projects.
Republicans could point out that this crisis is not just an opportunity to do other things. It’s a bloomin’ emergency. Robert Barro of Harvard estimates that there is a 30 percent chance of a depression. Warren Buffett says economic activity “has fallen off a cliff” and is not coming back soon.
Stock market declines are destroying $23 trillion in wealth, according to Lawrence Lindsey. Auto production is down by two-thirds since 2005. In China, 20 million migrant laborers have lost their jobs. Investment in developing countries has dropped from $929 billion in 2007 to $165 billion this year. Pension systems are fragile. Household balance sheets are still a wreck.
Republicans could argue that it’s Nero-esque for Democrats to be plotting extensive renovations when the house is on fire. They could point out that history will judge this president harshly if he’s off chasing distant visions while the markets see a void where his banking policy should be.
Second, Republicans could admit that they don’t know what the future holds, and they’re not going to try to make long-range plans based on assumptions that will be obsolete by summer. Unlike the Democrats, they’re not for making trillions of dollars in long-term spending commitments until they know where things stand.
Instead, they’re going to focus obsessively on restoring equilibrium first, and they’re going to understand that there is a sharp distinction between crisis policy-making and noncrisis policy-making. In times like these, you’d do things you would never do normally. When it’s over, we can go back to our regularly scheduled debates.
Third, Republicans could offer the public a realistic appraisal of the health of capitalism. Global capitalism is an innovative force, they could argue, but we have been reminded of its shortcomings. When exogenous forces like the rise of China and a flood of easy money hit the global marketplace, they can throw the entire system of out of whack, leading to a cascade of imbalances: higher debt, a grossly enlarged financial sector and unsustainable bubbles.
If the free market party doesn’t offer the public an honest appraisal of capitalism’s weaknesses, the public will never trust it to address them. Power will inevitably slide over to those who believe this crisis is a repudiation of global capitalism as a whole.
Fourth, Republicans could get out in front of this crisis for once. That would mean being out front with ideas to support the wealth-creating parts of the economy rather than merely propping up the fading parts. That would mean supporting President Obama’s plan for global stimulus coordination, because right now most of the world is free-riding off our expenditures. That would mean eliminating all this populist talk about letting Citigroup fail, because a cascade of insolvency would inevitably lead to full-scale nationalization. It would mean coming up with a bold banking plan, rather than just whining about whatever the Democrats have on offer.
Finally, Republicans could make it clear that that the emergency has to be followed by an era of balance. This crisis was fueled by financial decadence, and public debt could be 80 percent of G.D.P. by the time it’s over. Republicans should be the party of restoring fiscal balance — whatever it takes — not trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
If Republicans were to treat this like a genuine emergency, with initiative-grabbing approaches, they may not get their plans enacted, but voters would at least give them another look. Do I expect them to shift course in this manner? Not really.
Sarah Palin…….. Billing the taxpayers for her kids to travel to official events the children weren’t even invited to? She finally agreed to pay back the state for that money she took.
Her per diem charges to the state in the amount of $17,000 while she was living at home instead of in the governor’s mansion? She has now agreed to pay the taxes owed on that money. Another tawdry grab at a few dollars that didn’t belong to her.
Yes Jim….Here is the Republican Party at it’s best !
Did anyone get how funny Wooten’s column is today? Truth is the best humor. It just is. Now Wooten has me wondering if there’s one democrat in the country who pays his taxes.
There is no question who deserves to write professionally for the ajc, if that person is among the contributors to this forgettable freelance fish wrap. There is a soul who hoses every journalist here, and who snaps a towel at every troll. There is a writer who continually clotheslines the laundered flail of wind-chimes who wonk here. There is a writer: The Writer.
A few words deep in President Obama’s budget proposal have the fast
money crowd up in arms: “Tax carried interest as ordinary income.”
With those words, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his latest DealBook
column, the administration is seeking to close one of the biggest tax
loopholes on Wall Street — one nobody seemed to notice in good times,
when everyone was minting money.
Private equity and hedge fund types defend the favorable tax treatment
they have been getting on most of their income, and they’ve fought hard
to keep the status quo.
The idea is back on the table, however, and the tax switch would affect
others as well, including venture capital firms, real estate investment
firms and oil and gas investors — anyone who operates a partnership.
The venture capital community has already gone to Capitol Hill seeking
an exemption, arguing they are crucial to America’s entrepreneurial
spirit.
But in a show of a bit of competition between parts of the financial
industry, private equity wants to make sure venture capital gets taxed
if it is going to be taxed.
Citi is paying about $13 million to compensate employees
who had been expected to go on various trips that were later canceled,
Reuters reported. The payouts include $3.5 million in gift cards for
top Smith Barney brokers, The New York Post said.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York and Barney Frank of the House
Financial Services Committee on Monday sent a letter to Bank of America
seeking information on bonuses paid out to its employees and those of
Merrill Lynch.
Merrill Lynch offered millions in guaranteed bonuses to lure ten Latin
American investment bankers away from UBS last spring, giving one,
Alexandre Bettamio at least $7 million,
Warren E. Buffett said on Monday the U.S. economy had “fallen off a
cliff” but would eventually recover, although a rebound could kindle
inflation worse than that experienced in the late 1970s.
The New York Times Company said it raised $225 million through a
sale-leaseback deal with W. P. Carey & Company, an investment firm, for
part of The Times’s headquarters building.
Well, all the usual Democrats got up grouchy this morning. Sen. Brown must have gotten up grouchy that morning in the Gold Dome. And if one more person cuts’n'paste a long article, I’m going to get as grouchy as Sen. Brown. THE SUBJECT, folks. THE SUBJECT of today’s blog. ETHICS!!
I agree with Jim Wooten:”Those who don’t live by the laws they impose should be gone.” Absolutely! Even Democrats!!
Dusty, you TRAITOROUS WITCH! You forgot to say, “Except REPUBLICANS!” We worked TOO hard for TOO long, and have come TOO far for you to back down now on the “law applies to everyone equally” argument. What were you thinking? Do you want them to start prosecuting our Beloved former leaders like Bush and Cheney for taking their rightful exemptions? I’m so angry with you right now I could… I could…. OH, SPIT!
I will soothe your spirit Mrs. Repub. David Brooks @ 8:08 opens with a half truth, one that undermines the remainder of his argument. “The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems..” A fully-honest statement would have read, “The Democratic response to the economic crisis has no redeeming value.”
Over at Bookman’s woman2woman blog, Jay shares the simplicity of his pun palette: “Why do they call him steel? He should be called aluminum. He folded that fast.” Now, that doesn’t even make sense. Aluminum is as strong as steel and cant be folded. Aluminum FOIL, however…….The line should have been, if the author had any writing talent whatsoever, “Why do they call him steel? He was so easily foiled, he should be called aluminum. ………..he folded over so fast………..his credibility crumpled under the grilling…….from the big tent republican…….basted….reflective…..there’s a million of them..
But as it appeared, only the most blog-simple among us would have wasted a piece on that pun. Go wrap yourself, Bookman, you tin-man journalist. (I’ll let the trolls over there run with this)
Please return to your padded cell immediately! You have confused President Bush and V.Pres. Cheney with the loquacious losers of NON-TAX PAYERS who now run Washington.
If, by any slim chance, you paid your taxes the last few years please send your resume pronto to Mr. Geithner, our TAX CHIEF. He needs all the help he can get. It is no secret that he FORGETS to pay his taxes now and then. You might be of some help. But I doubt it.
All Democrats have very short memories regarding their own activities. As Ragnar suggested…. more or less…. “Democratic response….has no redeeming value.” So true!
Ragnar, I never knew editing like that was possible. No really, when one reads your rewrites, with the added authority and tone, and wonderful array of meanings only you can glean from the reams of words in your repertoire, what can one say, but, “JBMLAW!”
So Bookman ran you off and now you are crybaby cooing over here. Go outside! The birds are singing like crazy. They are soloing with the squirrels at the bird feeder. Get going! You need some sunshine!
Ragnar, I liked your first post, especially your points (1) and (2). Mr. Cagle is quite the operator, isn’t he? He seems to specialize in defending the indefensible.
It reminds me of Ms. Pelosi running interference for the earmarks. Before Truth, always protect the members who elected you to Leadership, rather than the voters who elected you and them in the first place.
By the way, President Obama’s education speech this morning, to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, sounded like something Aaron Sorkin would write, only devoid of ideas and specifics. He did endorse merit pay for good teachers, however, and called upon the states to develop more agressive programs to root out “bad teachers” who fail repeatedly to measure up to *federal* expectations. That should be a hard sell viz the NEA, of course, unless a deal had been cut during the election.
All in all, he spent the speech couching his obvious goal to federalize education in terms of “cooperation” with the states, calling upon them repeatedly to enact his objectives, all of which can only conduce to nationalization.
Dear Glenn, probably really @ 11:32 as the blog seems to remain on standard time, I think you are on target re: Mr. Cagle. Nobody has to go on the record in a manner that could embarrass later. That sort of thing could lead to cynicism.
Dear PoFo @ various times, you are in good form today, consistently entertaining, my compliments.
The Repubs, were they not so destructive, would be a joke.
They have worked on their “political double-speak” with the apparent outcome being they have much more work to do. Only a few of the truly devoted and those lacking the will and/or ability to understand what is being said versus what is being done still tolerate them.
The Repubs have brought pain and misery and they want to stand back and obstruct those who are trying to clean up their mess. Classic example of “throwing the rock and hiding their hands.”
The ashes of conservatism appear here regularly. Republicans have already wasted weeks of retorts on blaming Obama for Bush. They may as well say, “Why couldn’t the Chosen One, the Messiah Obama have stopped us from being ourselves for the past eight years? Where was he? Why didn’t he vote against the war? Okay bad example…..
Any rational, reasonable American would think that with less than 21 months until the next election, the Republiconned would not be wasting a single moment trying to stem their ever-worsening hemorrhaging.
Yet…
Electoral Bloodbath, Part Trois. Coming to an election everywhere next year.
Peter the difference between Palin and the people mentioned in this article (if what you said in your first post is true) “She has now agreed to pay the taxes owed on that money.” I don’t think they’ve paid and in some cases will even admit they owe, although there are liens against some of them.
Gerald,
I assure you I have no desire to inconvenience the poor & elderly. I do see a need to verify who a person is prior to their being able to vote. Look at the number of users registered by Acorn72, and the thousands that have now been verified to be bogus. That in itself indicates we need a law/rule to verify the person who shows up at to pole is the registered person they claim to be.
Perhaps you are against such a law, because you are not eligible to vote.
How exciting!! In the next big election, Sarah Palin can choose her job. She can be either President or Treasury Secretary . Palin knows how real people live, is experienced in governing and can make a good speech without a teleprompter. She is also THRIFTY! A winner!
But if she declines the presidential job, she can be Secretary of the Treasury. All you need for that is an excusable forgot-taxes mistake and you’ve got it made. Look at Sec. Geithner. Forgot his taxes but got forgiveness. Obama said anybody can make a little mistake. Voters look at Obama and say “That is true!”
So you and Churchill’s Mommy keep us posted on Palin news. She is very interesting and we all like to hear about her. A star on the rise! So much more capable than the Dem duds now running Washington.
From what I read the rules were changed in midstream on Palin…bottom line she paid up. Can you debate anything without name calling, Peter? Seems that almost everyone on this blog and Bookman’s that lean to the left make it their mission to viciously attack anyone that doesn’t wholeheartedly agree with them. Pathetic.
“Rules changed mid stream ” ? HA HA HA……. Yes taking her kids on events they were not invited too, and charging tax payers for their trip……working more days from home then in the office…..and then charging taxpayers to do so….?
Yes I imagine there was a “change in the tax code” ! OPS…… you mean she got caught !
Fed up……You know for certain she sent in the check ? We do know she acknowledged she is wrong !
Yes a star on the rise Dusty……. is that from the helicopter she uses to kill wild animals ?
Apparently you don’t have to be smart to be a Republican…..heck a Republican can just look across the sea, and call one’s self internationally savvy !
Perfect leadership for the Republican party ! She and Big Mouth Rush are really leading the way !
I am confused as to why Georgia’s Senators would request $209,000 to study ways to improve BLUEBERRY production. The media has swamped the nation daily concerning the problems that occurred with the PEANUT butter plant. This is very embarassing for the state of Georgia!!! Why not study/research ways to make the prodution of PEANUT butter safe?????
Probably skidded along the bottom enough. Kudlow’s head is about to explode. He’s actually been spitting all day. If he’s not the head of the republican party, he’s certainly the horn of the bull.
Wait a minute. 2/3rd’s majority was needed to approve. The vote was 32 for and 16 against. No wonder our legislature is less than competent. 32/(32+16)=.666667 or 2/3rd”s I know it was just a hand vote, but….
What’s wrong with Kudlow? Nothing. In fact, he sounds good. Anybody that might run against the doddering Dem Chris Dodd is wonderful. Besides that, Kudlow opposes estate taxes. I can’t see taking the money saved for your children on which you paid taxes and then the government takes it when you are gone.
Kudlow, I never knew you but keep your hat in the ring.
You will note that our legislators get their pay raises no matter how bad the recession. I would like to see them (at least offer) to take pay cuts like eveyone else.
Politicos, bureaucrats and all other adults who reside in our state should be subject to the same local, state and federal laws. Politicos help make our laws while bureaucrats help enforce them. But neither group should stand above our laws.
Good morning all. One of our fellow bloggers last week quoted noted ditherer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s chestnut about “consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.” Thus, as Obama is so much smarter than the rest of us, we should not expect any sort of intellectual activity that we would describe as ‘rational” – The Empty Suit is well beyond that stage.
We do not accuse the One Whom We Have Awaited of lying in his promise to abate earmarks – such an allegation would be base in discussing The Holy One. Surely all can see that this year is last year, and next year will not be this year. Even friend PoFo could not have phrased it so brilliantly. And always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom.
Stimulus after stimulus, all funding government at ever-higher levels, and constricting the productive economy ever more, may be having an effect. I think I heard the stock market is now at its highest level ever. And unemployment has plunged to the lowest recorded levels in history.
The only thing generally wrong with the Obama signing statement is that it is not April 1. Rush need not hope any longer – it is a fait accompli.
In addition to the AJC, I read an obscure alternative paper each morning, The Wall Street Journal. The top essays in that paper today are “causation of the housing bubble” and “treatment for the collapse in value of mortgage securities.” Rational policymaking requires understanding what specifically went wrong with former policy.
As to the “bubble,” Alan Greenspan argues that the Fed’s admittedly “easy” money policy 2001-2007 had no significant role in the housing bubble. To the “cure,” Warren Buffet advocates suspension of the regulator use of “mark to market.” We examine separately.
Chairman Greenspan’s argument, reduced to its simplest element, is that the Fed’s management of the short-term Fed funds rate was irrelevant to the decoupled longer term securities rates that funded mortgages. Lest we dismiss that as a hyper-technical and self-serving analysis, there is historical truth for his distinction.
The US had comparatively unprecedented inverted yield curves in 2005, i.e., long-term rates were actually lower than short-term rates. That is peculiar, as investors almost always require a premium for locking up their funds for a longer period.
To put the argument at a personal level, if an investor has a choice between a 4% cd for 24 months, or a 3.5% cd for 10 years, a normal investor will almost always choose the former, as there is no premium for accepting the longer-term risk. The market was otherwise in 2005, and this was after a long period of effective parity.
It is inconceivable for the Fed to conduct an “easy money” policy that would bring long-term rates lower than short-term. With an inverted curve, the market is forecasting deflation, seemingly irreconcilable with “easy money.” The only plausible explanation I ever heard for the phenomenon was that Chinese investors were looking for long-term investments to hide funds from their government. I am embarrassed to be reduced to a conspiratorial xenophobic argument, but I have no other.
Much of that long-term funding wound up in the US mortgage-backed securities market, as that was (historically) the most stable long-term securitized private investment. Chairman Greenspan’s argument is unsatisfying – we all prefer to blame a faceless demon for distress beyond our control – but it has a ring of truth. The Fed may be innocent.
Far happier is that Warren Buffet has embraced one of my two September 2008 resolutions to the seized-up financial markets. Last year we suggested that all would end happily if the government would do nothing more than (1) guarantee inter-bank obligations, and (2) suspend the “mark to market” rule.
Faithful students of the economy recall that, instead of the jbmlaw plan, the Bush administration teamed with Congressional Democrats to conduct a wild spending spree (“TARP”), alas only partially effective. TARP is now succeeded by the Obama administration’s even wilder spending sprees (“Stimulus” and “Continuing Budget Resolution,”) doomed to be even less effective as they are untargeted. Today’s news carries a note that Speaker Pelosi suggests there is need for another “stimulus” program. What do you call someone who keeps doing the same thing hoping for a different result?
“Mark to market” is one of those eye-glazing accounting issues for people outside the industry. The rule says that bank books should reflect component assets at whatever price the market values them, without regard to the actual performance of the assets. In the case of mortgage securities, currently there is no market for those securities at any price – thus a value of zero – due to fears of undiscoverable subprime customers.
Broadly 95% of mortgages continue to perform as agreed, thus there is a disconnect between market value and income value of the securities. The lack of marketability is crucial to banks, as securities transactions are the primary method of liquidity management for banks. This lack of liquidity is one element that led to financial seizure in the credit markets. The common government-slang term for those unmarketable but performing securities is “toxic assets.”
Mr. Buffet’s extended conversation with CNBC Monday produced enough headlines (mostly over his condemnation of Obama administration policies) that his “mark to market” comments have been broadly overlooked. Nevertheless, Mr. Buffet apparently sees the same things as I, (a) that mindless regulatory enforcement of the accounting construct manufactures false failures in the financial industry, (b) with typical ripple effects beyond those failures. Good to see that Warren is almost as sharp as your humble correspondent.
Gotta wonder what was earmarked for Georgia. Has the AJC reported on this? Because I’d entertain the thought of organizing an effort to attack any projects or programs earmarked for Georgia this year, perchance to kill the things in their cribs. Were such an effort successful, like-minded folks in other states could be challenged to follow suit.
Anybody know of a good, conservative communications firm?
Rag, you type like Rose Mary Woods, man! Listen, Everyone! Rag is teasing the lurkers by making them think he can type 500 words in five seconds, like Napolean Dynamite.
That said he tries to make some salient points, and My mother thanx him, my father thanx him, my wife thanx him, (if she were still with us: now she belongs to the angels), and I thank him.
I met my wife at Hoolihan’s, and we danced for hours. In all of our 26 years of marriage, we never danced together again; we both hated dancing, we only danced when we met because we both just wanted to get laid. We were inseparable after that. I never met anyone with absolutely no respect for authority like my wife. She didn’t respect parents, teachers, police, politicians, God, her customers (art brokers), boyfriends, or anything or anybody. I thought I was a badass, but I was not worthy. We didn’t have a perfect marriage, (she didn’t respect husbands either – I was the 3rd).
Over the years, I estimate that my wife sold nearly 50 thousand paintings. We worked side by side, producing and marketing and paying taxes on the artwork. To pass the time, we’d riff comedy material and she wasn’t just an artistic genius, but a comedic upstart. Her line, “Volvo with a gun rack” made it all the way into Robin William’s act in his 2002 HBO special. I opened with that line for five years, from 1991 – 2001, and it NEVER failed to produce a really big laugh. (robin william’s didn’t get a laugh with it because he used it wrong). I truly was not worthy of her, and I married WAY over my head. She often expressed regret at having married me, but fortunately we had a child and she wouldn’t separate father and daughter.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson has just unveiled a new vision for Georgia that would surpass previous endeavors and might even make a little money.
Richardson would make Georgia the marriage capital of the nation almost overnight. Atlanta could become Las Vegas East, without quite as many home foreclosures but with a lot more churches.
We’ve been given only a peek at Romeo’s great cash project. Last week, in a rare appearance in the well of the House, Richardson delivered a rip-roaring argument for allowing the state’s constitutional officers to perform legal wedding ceremonies.
The marriage measure sailed to passage in the House with only one dissenting vote. Spoilsport Rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, cast the lone “nay.”
If the Senate signs off on the House action, Georgia will have more politician-parsons than any state east of the Ozarks. Just look at who would be given the legal right to hitch man and woman into legal matrimony: the current governor, the former governor, the lieutenant governor, House Speaker, House Speaker pro tem, Senate president pro tem, attorney general, secretary of state, state school superintendent, commissioners of labor, insurance and agriculture, and, of course, the state House clerk.
This new battalion of marryin’ folk could set up booths on every corner of every county seat. Georgians and out-of-state tourists could customize their marriage ceremonies to fit their personalities. One might tap Gov. Sonny Perdue for the honors, and the governor might throw in a bass-fishing trip as a free prize.
Not many people know that Georgia once hosted a thriving marriage mill industry. One such mill was located near Folkston to make it easy for Florida couples to sneak across the line and tie the knot. The other mill, at Ringgold, was located near the Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina state lines. That made the Georgia stop super-convenient for mountain couples with a sudden yen to get hitched.
Alas, Georgia’s blue noses crusaded against the mills, labeling them illegal, immoral and perhaps unconstitutional. Like the roadside clip joints and pet bears and possums, wedding centers vanished from the landscape. Not a word has been heard about them – until now.
One might think the General Assembly would be working overtime in this especially crucial session. But no, that is not the case. Between planning marriage chapels and selling bass tackle, Georgia lawmakers have had little to do but twiddle their thumbs and watch the mailbox, awaiting the arrival of government bailout money.
Of course, they could have occupied their time otherwise, with items such as:
► Fixing the state laws that allowed subprime loans and set off an unprecedented wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures.
► Investigating Georgia Power to determine why the company wants Georgia taxpayers to pay for a nuclear power plant seven years before it is built.
► Calling for a referendum on casino gambling in several border counties. (Just think of the new revenues that would generate.)
► Reorganizing Georgia’s state budget writers. Last year’s team missed Georgia’s total estimated income and appropriations by 37 percent.
► Creating a special ethics commission to oversee Gov. Perdue’s method of estimating the annual revenue. Any project with “ethics” in the title always makes the legislators look good, and they don’t have to work much to win praise.
We could think of a thousand other projects to keep state officials busy while they waited for the Obama bailout. When the bailout train finally does roll into the station, our lawmakers will have to get down to hard labor and forget wedding chapels for the moment. The lawmakers will need to work around the clock reorganizing Georgia’s budget so we can spend our way out of debt. For this crowd, that should be just as easy as a walk down the aisle.
Well, the price of Skoal went up again and what I want to know is who put that in this Obama budget? Anyhow, if earmarks was hogs we’d all need noseplugs just to walk outdoors. This budget is a disgrace, and it don’t even include the money to run a entrance ramp to GA 400 from Simpsons Trailer Park.
I see Raghead beat out Wooten again for most words. It beats me how he can read all the good Conservative writters in the papers and come out with something that looks like he spent all night on it when Wooten ain’t even put out the column yet. It’s pretty clear he’s cut out for the law. He probly can’t clear his throat without needing 3,000 words to do it.
I’m real sorry to learn this a.m. this Chris Broe lost his wife. I knowed she was sick but until today I didn’t know she died. I’ll get all the folk down at the Church of Holiness to put in a prayer for him. I know I’d have a hard time making it without the missus. Have a good day everybody.
Dear PoFo @ 8:10/9:10, I know you do not wish sympathy, but we will all miss your muse. Congratulations on a great 26 years – many are never so blessed. I am grateful that your wife’s physical misery has ended, and you have our prayers/wishes for your own psychic recovery.
The Conservatives complain about all of the spending from the Obama administration, yet the Conservatives are including tons of earmarks of their own. The budget is supposedly only 8% higher than the last federal budget. Hey people, the costs of everything is going up and up, so the budget has to go up also to even cover the same expenditures as in the previous year. Let President Obama work in peace, but let him not just accept every bill that shows up on his desk. The President will do fine; just give him some time.
Rag’s point could be summed up in one sentence, “You cant make a silk parse out of a sow’s earmark”.
Rag’s problem in communication is a common one. He’s like a modern day Shubert, who used to worship Beethoven from afar, only catching fleeting glimpses of his hero across a town square, or down the street. Shubert wrote masterpiece after masterpiece during his life, and his symphonic range was astonishing. He died young, thinking himself unworthy. But he achieved everything that Beethoven achieved in music: A distant second to Mozart. Okay, rag isn’t like Shubert, I just like to tell that story.
The point about Rag is that he cannot understand the writing 101 class that I give freely everyday to one and all: Subject matter dictates tone. Tone dictates structure.
Now what does that mean? Subject matter in Rag’s first comment is Obama’s inherited economy, and he properly assumes the tone of the bitter sarcasms and the learned attitudes inherent in any partisan truth. But his structure doesn’t match the tone. What is structure? Structure is like the gravitational constraints on an architect who wants to design a weird modern building. He has to trust the math. He cant invent irrational numbers or assume that there is a final digit for Pi. Thus, Rag’s premise, that any new president is responsible for the status quo on inauguration day, wont support any poetically phrased prose. Lets take a closer look:
He opens with Emerson. New rule: Never quote Emerson. First, you’ll miss Emerson’s point, although you may come close. Second. Never riff on a genius. Never. I knew this one guy who though he could edit Mark Twain. I warned him. He scoffed. I think he’s dead.
I’m being cruel to be kind but I will illustrate my point with some history that I’ve recited many, many times over the years on this blog, and which Richard Belzer used in a tribute to Carlin last month. . Mark Twain said (and I quote), “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
PS. Forget the second comment from rag. To the extent that a lurker would wade into Rag’s second comment, after reading the first, is the extent to which they are an imbecile. Judge yourself today by that extent. You know the truth. You are applying this litmus test to yourself long after you waded into rag’s second comment.
I’m very sorry to read of your wife’s death. Your occasional references to her always were uniquely touching, and appreciative of her uniqueness. Please accept my sincere condolences, even though you don’t want to.
and lets get another thing straight: I appreciate condolences. I don’t want them expressed because dusty, glenn, Andy, corporal, redneck, getalife and @@ will then impersonate me dissing the commiserations. You people are a total embarrassment. I cant imagine what the lurkers must think. But let them know now. That a new era is upon us. The unrefined grist that the AJC presents as candidature for the new conservative writer is a test to see if anyone understands the real application protocol: Whoever shall grasp the Pen from the Conservative Rosetta Stone is mightier than King Arthur and Excalibur!
That edit will be the winner.
Jklol
I know I have a tendency to swoop in and total obliterate a blog. I know the jealousies and bitterness that accompany the coveting of writing prowess. Just yesterday, I read the New York Times review of Jane Fonda’s return to Broadway, and I was jealous and bitter because I’ll never write like that. I barely understood it; I only understood it to the extent that I knew that I am unworthy. So, I emailed dusty’s and @@’s last 500 comments to this wonderful writer and just hope that they somehow clobbered him or her.
Good morning all. I am glad to see Rag is on the job. His blinding brillance is exceeded only by his dearth of objectivity and carefully crafted intellectual dishonesty. He carefully left out that Buffet said that patriotic Republicans and Democrats should get behind the President. Buffet is for the mark to market rule to ensure a company’s balance sheet can be trusted. He is also for some easing of the regulatory side of it for banks to help lighten the reserve requirments. You either can’t hear or you totally misrepresented what he said.Buffet see nothing like you, he actually supports Obama.
By the way, the the ditherer’s chestnut is actually ” a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Key word being foolish. Words do matter.
Dear Glenn @ various other times, your note at 8:00/9:00 was prescient. Drudge reports that Mark Sanford is formally rejecting portions of the “stimulus” monies. You and Mark are on the same wavelength.
What Ragnar protests, I think, is the Obamaphiles’ blatant play for “dehobgoblinization”, one of the late Mr. Buckley’s favorite coinages.
Incidentally, I never liked Emerson’s aphorisms. For me, he was a belletrist, best understood, as Chris Broe points out, in the context of his windy essays taken whole. He wrote at a stand-up desk, to discipline his tendency to wordiness. Still, it’s fascinating to see him attempt to streamline antebellum English — a project undertaken with greater success by Lincoln, Whitman, Melville and Emerson’s protoge, Thoreau. But for their many modernizations, even Twain later would have sounded like Poe.
In his first two paragraphs of the day, by the way, Ragnar reads distinctly like the actual Twain, whereas in his most recent post, Chris Broe sounds, unfortunately, more like me.
Dear Prez @ 9:40/10:40, I make no pretense at objectivity, leaving that form of dishonesty to our leftists. But I respectfully believe I report correctly on the mark to market.
You are correct that Warren likes the “mark to market” for benefit of investors – surely we see the clamor for financial stocks now – but you dishonestly conceal his firm affirmation that regulators need to disregard “mark to market” for all regulatory decisions. As that element of financial stability is the sole reason for my advocacy of suspension of mark to market, Warren and I are closer in sync than you and he.
As to his “support” of Obama, I acknowledge he affirmed his support for Obama while eviscerating every policy so-far advocated by The Empty Suit. Support like that is reminiscent of Harry Reid’s advocacy for Bush policy is Iraq.
I don’t care what you say. You fantasize enough about your own words to take care of that. But I am sorry to learn that your wife has died. Must have been an exciting marriage. Hang in there! You are funny…sometimes…not to mention that you were more wordy than Ragnar today. We do excuse you for that …today only.
*”Surely all can see that this year is last year, and next year will not be this year.”*
Ragnar,
That witty and winning line reminds me of the time the Speaker of the California Legislature, facing constitutional deadlines, pronounced an edict stating that, “for purposes of legislation, Tuesday shall be a Thursday”. We used to call it “tesseracting”.
Funny people, politicians. Except when they hook up with a Goebbels, a Beriya or a Chou En-Lai.
Dear Glenn @ various times, you have insight into some of the overlord personalities. Do you know anything about this “intelligence” guy Charles Freeman? He sounds like a real piece of work.
I’m enamored of your final point, Mr. Wooten, that while families are belt-tightening until their heads turn blue, Washington is on a spending spree. At lunch yesterday in Gainesville I overheard an elderly gentleman speak with amazement of how impolitic this is, of how it just won’t play at the kitchen table.
I side with the Teamsters, though, on circumscribing Mexican trucking in the U.S. Mexican trucks should be contained within the break-bulk zones. The trucks are not maintained to our standards, and are a road hazard. We haven’t the resources to inspect them all, and Mexico hasn’t the will to do so.
I just looked up the fellow’s resume. Nauseating. There’s a certain breed of polecat in the Fever Swamp that specializes in selling out the U.S. to hostile foreign interests. This guy Freeman definitely is of that low subspecies. My guess is that Feinstein objected to his lucrative flacking for China, while others on the Committee may have noted that as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia he seems to have done nothing to warn of the dangers of Wahabbi militancy orchestrated by the Kingdom.
I see that he has some choice words for Israel. Oy vey.
It is indeed depressing to see how someone who is supposed to be “informed” and “objective” can ramrod this kind of nonsense to his readers. The bill passed today was to continue keeping the government running for the rest of FY-09. It is not the FY-10 budget, where we are promised more scrutiny against earmarks. Anyone with any sense can go to whitehouse.gov and read what the budget entails. If he did not sign it today, the government would have closed-down COB today. If your congresspersons or senators did not budgetize earmarks for Georgia, so be it. The less the better. Consider yourselves privileged. The author obviously has no knowledge of the federal budget process and is not informed.
Jim Wooten’s article looks like it took about 2 minutes to write. If he had bothered to mention the specific Republican earmarks it might have taken 4 minutes. He is getting paid for his pathetically simple minded school yard rants when most of the people on this blog can write circles around him.
I live closer to Chattanooga than Atlanta and my wife thinks its stupid I watch WSB news in the morning instead of a closer station. The answer is simple, really – Karen Minton and Carol Sbarge. Delicious.
Jim I hate to tell you this (not really!) but your opinions have become totally irrelevant. Outside of the Pompous Ragnar, Glenn, and the bobble headed one Dusty nobody bothers with you anymore. Witness your measley 27 posts against Bookman who has a morning post that had 105 responses, and an afternoon post where 164 people have opined. Why wait pull the plug now!
I see you are still a purely comic character without character. To compare Wooten’s blog to Bookman’s is like comparing filet mignon to sardines. You’ve got the sardines over at Bookman’s, lotsa them. The steak is here.
Please stay at Bookman’s. When we want to smell fishy, we will call you.
Without the presence of the Federal Reserve in the marketplace there would never have been the available money to create the stock market, dot com, real estate, or any other bubbles that we have faced since their creation. Certainly other players manipulated their investment products to entice the gullible, but once again, not one of those malinvestment opportunities would have been available in a market limited by sound money.
The true culprits were gathered together on that fateful night in November 1913 on Jekyl Island. The conspiracy to rob the american economy, sow the seeds of expansive and oppressive government (fueled by deficit spending), and empower the banking system once again to pull all of the levers of power was launched in that fateful Geogia location. Unfortunately those bankers and president Wilson are long gone so their treasonous crimes will go unpunished.
So long as we allow spin artists to deflect blame away from the true monster that is destroying this country and allow the blame to fall on groups acting in their own self-interest but deceived by the Fed’s manipulative market signals we will never come together to get rid of the Federal Reserve and restore sound money policies to this nation and this government. Without such monetary reform, we are all doomed to permanent enslavement to a system that is being run for the benefit of banks and the entrenched government, and not the american people.
A government forced to live within its means by the implicit restraints of a sound monetary system based on gold or other commodity would be in no position to afford these kind of earmarks or the ridiculous deficit spending that is robbing ours and the next dozen generations blind.
As for the earmarks, if the congress doesn’t decided where the money will be spent, then the president gets to decide where 100% of the budget money goes. Does that actually sound like a better situation – especially given this president?
When all of the businesses and individuals in your district paid $100 million in taxes, wouldn’t there be an expectation on their part that some of that would come back to them for local projects? Especially since a bunch of that money is from federal highway tax dollars?
The system is way messed up. The government shouldn’t take the money from us in the first place. Once they have taken it, it is the responsibility of my congressman to try and get it back for our district. Not the ideal situation, but until the taxation ends, that is the best way to keep the idiots in washinton from wasting it on “shovel ready” stupidity at the capitol.
Dusty, Wooten is for the shallow, one dimentional, simple minded ideologs who masquerade as intellectuals. No one has all the answers so by pretending you do you show your emotion drives your thoughts and that your intellect does not guide your emotion.
Wooten is a mile wide and an inch deep. You fit in perfectly
Steny Hoyer puts out an op ed today on why earmarks aren’t that big of a deal. He says it is only 2% of the bill. Wouldn’t you like another 2% raise? If you could cut your entire personal spending by 2% per year, couldn’t you make progress against your personal debt? Then why is it ‘no big deal’ to through in another 2% on top, Steny says.
That kind of thinking is why we do not want to depend on govt for anything. They can’t do anything responsibly.
Thank you for parading as an intellectual to tell us how we are parading as intellectuals. You remind me of those clowns who change IDs to suit each rant and rave. Keep parading, honey, we love a parade.
Wooten brings to our attention a bill that enslaves Americans to debt for decades. It is loaded with “pork”, favors and resurrected past losses to Democrats. He notes that Obama cannot see such items now that he is elected. Obama’s sight was better when he was running in the elections. But he forgets what he said!
Jim Wooten quite properly reminds us of what is coming down the pike. In fact, I think it has already hit us. That does make me a bit emotional. I’m not in debt and I do not want the country swallowed by debt.
Maybe you should get emotional instead of Demo dead to facts. Right now you seem blind in Obama’s headlights. Roadkill aint pretty!!
Hey 2:52, you’re a real funny guy (?). Have you looked at Bookman’s blog lately? The latest was something like “good news, okay not really make something up”. That’s really intellectual. At least Wooten gives us something that’s really happening to debate about rather than Bookman’s which promote name calling and vicious attacks. Bookman then calls out anyone who doesn’t agree with his ideas but lets anyone who does agree with his idealogy say whatever they want. Why don’t you go on over there under your real name and blog away.
Boy this is right on the MARK ……. I second this……. GREAT JOB Posting this !
“david wayne osedach
March 10th, 2009
5:10 pm
You will note that our legislators get their pay raises no matter how bad the recession. I would like to see them (at least offer) to take pay cuts like everyone else.”
YES…..Thank you…..
These are the same guys that are willing to use our tax dollars for what ever….bail out made up Wall Street Instruments….. help Corporate America survive….create a WAR….from the Auto industry perspective….they are asking workers all over America to take a Pay cut….what a concept…..
I know folks who just took a 10% pay cut, and / or a slash in benefits as well….they said yes, they have a job.
Seems the Senate and House didn’t do too good a job running America these past (8) years……and I believe it speaks for both sides of the isle.
They should get a pay cut for their …”COLLECTIVE”… failure……..especially anyone that is now going past 8 years…….
Seems to me if they got paid on merit like Obama is suggesting for teachers…… they would not have “Merited” the (8) secretive pay raises they gave themselves !
Perhaps that is what America needs……
Pay the Senators and Congress folks based on how America is doing ?
If enough right-wings hacks report that Obama promised to end earmarks, then it must be true, right?
Wrong. McCain promised to end earmarks, Obama said he would reform the procedure, he never promised to end earmarks altogether. . It has been reformed a great deal. The earmarks used to be secret, so there was no accountability. Somebody has to decide how the money gets spent. It’s wrong if elected officials do it, but okay if a bureaucrat does? 40% of the earmarks were for republicans who make up roughly 40% of Congress.
Don’t be ridiculous. Shut down the government in the midst of our crisis that threatens to destroy us? And McConnell voted against it? Did he remove his more than 50 million in earmarks before he cast a vote he knew would lose? How many earmarks did your pet lapdogs in Georgia put in there? You people are massive hypocrites. If politicians don’t want earmarks, the solution is so simple: don’t insert them into budget bills that have to be passed. Don’t put them in at all. Why is that concept so hard for Wooten?
Hey Dick..you forgot to mention that the 164 blogs on the Bookman post are primarly comprised of idiotic rhetoric between 4 05 5 left and right wing nuts..much like this post.
This Clown we have in the White House is going to bankrupt this country. One day real soon this nation is going to wake up and say, “My God, what have we done by putting this clown in office?”.
Jim are you on strike? Looks like the Liberal Press is after our girl again.
Levi, Bristol break up
It’s true. You probably don’t believe it.
A source close to Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, mother to Tripp and her fiance, Levi Johnson, father of Tripp, told People the couple broke up a few weeks ago.
The mag reports:
“It kind of just happened,” says the source, referring to the split. “I thought they would stick it out. But I think they can work together to raise Tripp.”
“I’m not sure what caused [them to break up] – it’s common knowledge,” says another source who knows the family.
Despite the breakup, Levi still sees the couple’s son. Levi’s dad, Keith Johnston, told PEOPLE recently that his son is a devoted and “proud father.”
“As for how she is holding up after the split, the source tells PEOPLE: “Bristol’s doing okay. Tripp is fine.”
Throngs of onlookers turned out Thursday morning to seek a glimpse of
Bernard L. Madoff as he arrived in federal court in New York to plead
guilty to operating a vast 20-year Ponzi scheme.
And there is a strong chance that he will not return home, The New York
Times’s Diana B. Henriques writes. Once Mr. Madoff makes his plea, the
legal burden shifts, and his lawyers must then persuade the court that
he should remain free until his sentencing, perhaps more than two
months away.
Meanwhile, the government’s investigation will continue, and the
fallout from the fraud will reverberate for years.
India’s fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services closes registrations for
potential bidders on Thursday, kicking off a process to sell a majority
stake in the company caught in the country’s biggest corporate scandal
A representative for the California Media Workers Guild said the union
is trying to cobble together an investor group to buy The San Francisco
Chronicle from Hearst, which has threatened to shut down the
money-losing newspaper.
Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, claimed on Wednesday
that Merrill Lynch misled Congress over the timing of its plans to
award billions of dollars in bonuses last December.
Bank of America’s finance chief, Joe Price, said this week that he and
most of his industry failed to foresee the economic meltdown in part
because they relied on backward-looking models.
Baugur Group, the Icelandic retail investor that crashed along with its
nation’s banks, said Wednesday it would file for bankruptcy after a
court called time on its efforts to reorganize.
The Securities and Exchange Commission aims to issue a proposal in
April to restore the so-called uptick rule and will look at other ways
to address short-selling in the stock market, the agency’s chairwoman,
Mary L. Schapiro, confirmed on Wednesday.
Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance company, posted a fourth-quarter loss
of $23.9 billion Wednesday and said it would ask for additional
government aid of nearly $31 billion.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the richest man again, overtaking
investor Warren E. Buffett, as the global financial meltdown wiped out
$2 trillion from the net worth of the world’s billionaires, Forbes
Magazine said on Wednesday.
Dusty you sound like the French Rulers before the revolution……..
“To compare Wooten’s blog to Bookman’s is like comparing filet mignon to sardines. You’ve got the sardines over at Bookman’s, lotsa them. The steak is here.”
Why didn’t you just say………. “Let them Eat Cake” ?
Well Churchill’s MOM…… You shouldn’t have gone there about the Younger Palin girl…….Remember they Paraded her all over the TV, and at the Convention……That WAS a Proud moment for the “Right Wingers” ! Now she is just like the rest of the “Knocked up kids out there”…..No Daddy for the kid……
Gee funny how that sometimes happens ? Too bad the Parents of this kid didn’t pay attention !
Good morning all. While we await Jim, I offer an argument. AJC’s James Salzer offers a detailed summary of a political battle expected today in the Georgia House of Representatives.
“Under legislation the House will consider, people who buy vehicles starting next year won’t pay property taxes on those cars. They also wouldn’t pay a sales tax they’d normally pay if they bought from a dealer. To replace those taxes, all buyers will have to pay a fee of 7 percent, up to a maximum of $2,000, when they title their vehicles. Georgians who keep their present cars will still have to pay the annual property taxes until they buy another one.”
My analysis assumes faithful reporting by Mr. Salzer, and I have no reason to doubt any element of his report. Mr. Salzer implies that there is partisan dispute over whether this bill is a “tax increase.” House Minority Leader DuBose Porter affirms, in unnecessarily prolix language, that it is a tax increase. (I would offer an observation about the redundancy in “politician” and “unnecessarily prolix language,” but Ragnars ought not hurl boulders within glass abodes.)
I infer republican leaders deny Mr. Porter’s charge, even though “Tom Rice (R-Norcross) said the bill will result in state and local governments taking in hundreds of millions of dollars more than they get now from sales taxes on cars sold by dealers and from the annual property taxes. Between $100 million and $150 million of that would go to pay for a new trauma health care system”
Several observations:
(1) Elimination of a property tax is generally a good thing, as wealth taxes are generally bad things. Here the current tax is routinely assessed against a rapidly depreciating asset otherwise often necessary for generation of personal income. Such a tax punishes a wage earner as harshly as the dilettante. I generally favor taxing dilettantes more harshly than wage earners, as the former do not contribute to the weal of society. So that is a point in favor of the general intention of the legislation.
(2) Georgians who keep their present cars still have to pay the tax. Thus there is no tax eliminated for anyone. That is a point against the legislation.
(3) Any change in taxation, that results in “taking in hundreds of millions of dollars more than they get now,” is a tax increase. That is a point against the legislation.
(4) Sponsors of the legislation justify it in order to divert $100 million of taxpayer monies on subsidies to the “impoverished” health care industry. What a crock.
I freely and fairly object to democrats who call wild spending a “stimulus” when it clearly is not. The appellation “liar” is appropriate in such a circumstance, although I generally refrain from applying same.
Similarly, I object to my republicans denying existence of a tax increase when a change results in hundreds of millions of dollars more than they take in now. I object to my republicans selling as “tax elimination” that which does not eliminate anyone’s taxes. I object to my republicans concealing corporate welfare for benefit of the healthiest private industry in the state.
Duplicities of this sort are why national republicans deservedly sit on the sidelines; their state brethren are slow learners pursuing the same path. Those pushing this legislation may not be “my republicans.” Who is running this burlesque?
Good morning all. The proposed legislation does nothing to reduce costs for businesses – indeed, it promises only to raise labor costs. Businesses are rarely capable of raising prices during a recession, so the new costs of “Employee Free Choice” will not be passed along. There are no meaningful profits to absorb costs now.
In such an environment, employers have only the choice of “outsourcing” as a means of containing costs. India thanks the US Congress, Mexico thanks the US Congress, Philippines thanks the US Congress.
Looks like the Liberal Press is after our girl again.
Levi, Bristol break up
It’s true. You probably don’t believe it.
A source close to Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, mother to Tripp and her fiance, Levi Johnson, father of Tripp, told People the couple broke up a few weeks ago.
The mag reports:
“It kind of just happened,” says the source, referring to the split. “I thought they would stick it out. But I think they can work together to raise Tripp.”
“I’m not sure what caused [them to break up] – it’s common knowledge,” says another source who knows the family.
Despite the breakup, Levi still sees the couple’s son. Levi’s dad, Keith Johnston, told PEOPLE recently that his son is a devoted and “proud father.”
“As for how she is holding up after the split, the source tells PEOPLE: “Bristol’s doing okay. Tripp is fine.”
Jim Wooten has been spitting out right-wing cliches for years, and I usually ignore them. This one gets my goat. Wooten’s logic is the only way to keep jobs in the US is for workers to be paid every year. If we don’t keep taking this hit, our jobs will go to Mexico. I work in a grocery store. Jim, do you really believe the peanut butter shelf is going overseas? Perhaps you should read more than one study on a topic before forming an opinion. EFCA is a small attempt to finally level the playing field at the workplace. If one truly believes in common sense, then fairness shouldn’t make one uncomfortable.
It’s amazing to me that Republicans accuse this legislation of having possible dire consequences for our economy. Exactly how did we get into the situation we are currently suffering? It’s not like their policies favoring total employer control have done us any good. I say move over and let labor have their turn. The scare tactics surrounding government arbitration also make me laugh. Arbitrators are not government employees. Arbitrators are skilled in the area of labor relation, are often professionally certified, are ideologically neutral, and often have years of experience in labor/employment law matters. Interest arbitration, if it went that far, would be conducted by a knowledgeable arbitrator. The goal of course, it to promote bargaining between employer and union which has been the overall goal of the NLRA. It’s good legislation introduced at a great time.
Figures that a newspaper in the “FIRE AT WILL” state would publish this.
In the words of Bernie from Home Depot:
“This is the demise of a civilization,” moaned Bernie Marcus, cofounder and former CEO of The Home Depot, during an Oct. 17 conference call about card check. “This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it.”
Mr. Marcus sketched out the doomsday scenario for his listeners, with unions going after what he called the “low hanging fruit” and proceeding to organize workers in industry after industry. He had taken it upon himself to notify the nation’s CEOs of the danger, but they were not yet grabbing their guns. “This is as important as anything that’s ever happened to these companies. And they’re not reacting, and they’re not fighting. The old time fighters are gone.”
But in the class war, as in the real deal, there are always ways of motivating the yellow. “If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys,” Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers “should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs.”
As a member of management in for a National distributor, I can say without question, that management in most large companies don’t want card check to come law, because it will take away THEIR ability to coerce and intimidate workers. Management has always been able to threaten workers if there was even the hint of talk about a union. Wooton, you should stop giving the company (Republican) line and make an effort to understand the issues before you trash them. The facts tend to go a long way….
Jim hates labor unions because they have successfully afforded working people protection from being worked day and night, seven days a week and being paid minimal wages. Jim subscribes to the Wal-Mart model where workers, in China and America, work long hours, receive little pay, no benefits and are subject to the whims and vagaries of management. Jim is the local mouthpiece for the Republinazi Party and refuses to realize the sun has set on the fascist era in America. Go to your farm and express your inane philosophy to the cows Jim. Soon the air will be filled with the dissatisfied lowing of those poor, sonically abused animals!
Ragnar, Please don’t blame the problems at GM soley on the unions… Crappy managment with worse ideas are more to blame. the union have not done the company any favors, But the were absolutely essential to the growth of the middle class in this country.
OK then if the interest is really fairness, let’s make card check work the other way as well. If 50% of the employees sign a card to get rid of a union, then the union no longer represents workers at that workplace.
In the interest of fairness, workers can leave a company any time they want and employers can fire workers any time they want with no requirements by either party.
In the interest of fairness, employees can strike any time they want and employers can lock out workers any time they want.
In the interest of fairness, employees and workers can negotiate any salary and benefits they want, including something below minimum wage.
I say we just keep doing things the same way they were done the last 8 years. That’s working really well. Plus we should follow all advice from the south, seeing as they get all the welfare from the federal government.
Ragweed, the workers at GM merely built the automobiles. Management drove the company into the dirt! They built ill-conceived gas hogs that were poorly designed. The workers put that crap together. They did their jobs. Management did not! Workers of the world unite!
Dear Reality @ 10:52/11:52, good afternoon. I don’t think the uninspired management of GM was as relevant to its destruction as CAFE and legacy health care for unionized employees.
Even now the large vehicle lines are profitable; only those small vehicle lines maintained for the sake of fleet compliance with CAFE are unprofitable. I broadly agree that, but for the misguided act of Congress, GM would have been able to survive the union’s contribution to its problems.
Dear Algonquin @ 11:10, would you amend card check to also prohibit companies from paying any expenses for legacy employees? Would you amend card check to make it reciprocal, so that a company can produce signed cards to decertify a union?
I’m still not getting the full picture of the mechanism for card check. Under this bill, would workers simply hand their cards to some representative, or are the workers to deposit them in some kind of locked box? If the former, I can see a basis for the argument about worker intimidation. If the latter, I don’t buy that argument at all.
In any case, the current situation is totally unfair to workers who wish to unionize, and it has been that way for many years. Not only are they subject to immediate termination if their desires are known, but also they can be forced by employers to attend anti-union meetings organized by their employers–see WalMart. The obstacles to forming a union are so severe that not many organizations will become unionized under the current system.
I would like to see what the current language of EFCA says before I comment any further. If workers are given the protection of making their wishes known secretly under EFCA, then I’m all for the bill as a way of unionizing without the hell workers must currently go through to do so. If not, I have real reservations about it.
[...] especially corporate–interests. Led by the Chamber of Commerce, opponents of EFCA have been very effective in driving the popular narrative of the Act as an anti-democratic attempt to rob workers of their [...]
The biggest problem with card check is the same as with every initiative of the democrats – it raises expenses for business. Democrats imagine that businesses produce money out of air. There are only two ways for businesses to cover new higher expenses – pass those expenses along to customers, or cut other expenses.
The only significant areas of our economy not already unionized, and thus eligible for the “benefit” of card check, are the “service” sector. How much more are you willing to pay to use an ATM so banks will be able to pay for their unionized work force. Will you pay $4 for a quarterpounder? Or are those businesses going to suffer a loss of business?
“Curious Observer” raises a good question. My biggest problem with the bill (as I have read about it in the media) is the elimination of a secret-ballot vote. If the unions thought they had a legitimate argument to make for their organization, they should not fear a standard election. Intimidation works both ways. Companies have been guilty of scaring workers away from unions, and unions have tried to scare workers into joining their ranks. The government needs to step in as an honest referee to make sure a fair, secret vote should take place. Circumventing this process will harm, not help, all workers.
Dear jackie and all other supporters of card check, you avoid the fundamental truth at the heart of the legislation. Unions always lose secret elections. Thus you have to find a way to avoid a secret election to unionize. Do you not grasp the implications there, the “how” that accompanies the winning campaign where there is no secret election?
Dear Mlkey72 @ 11:40/12:40, the proponents of the legislation will be quick to tell you that their legislation does not “abolish” the secret election, it merely adds another means of unionizing. Of course, the alternate means that permits circumvention of a secret election will become the preferred method of the unions.
Dear Jackie @ 11:32, you would argue that those of us who would preserve the secret election for laborers are opposed to the laborers, and those of you who would abolish – either de facto or de jure – the secret election are protecting the laborers. A curious logic, that.
The wordsmith skills are superb.
However, a careful review of what you have said is double-speak.
A secret ballot would be best for everyone concerned. Letting the worker decide if they want to become a member of a union and have said union certified by the National Labor Review Board is in everyone’s best interest.
If the workers choose to decertify a union, so be it.
So, to give a a straight answer, I support the secret ballot and the workers desire to have that union represent them in negotiations with the employer.
If it weren’t for a union, Jim and his colleagues would be paid like folks at the Tifton Gazette and Cherokee Tribune – in other words, like rookie school teachers. Thank the Guild for your gold, Jim.
Rag, I don’t understand the aversion to CAFE standards. Fuel efficient cars? Sounds like a good idea to me. Perhaps you have a lot of big oil stocks in your portfolio? All the more reason for the USA to be beholden to the mideast oil tit right? Typical right wing short sighted thinking as usual.
@Reality Check: Completely untrue. There is no language in the card check bill to allow members to decertify a union through card check. That still must be done with a secret ballot.
Not only must employers pay unemployment insurance for workers, but employers with 100 or more full-time workers must give 60 days’ warning of a closing or layoff to both workers and government officials when shutting down an operation affecting 50 or more full-time workers. An employee can walk out the door at any moment with no notice and no obligation.
Several states require companies engaged in lockouts to pay either unemployment and/or benefits for locked out workers.
In each of these scenarios, companies have many obligations to the workers, but workers have none in return. Hardly strikes me as fair.
Dear Jackie @ 12:18/1:16, my wordsmith skills must be better than you perceive. We are in full agreement on the need to preserve secret elections. The proposed legislation would obviate the need for a secret election.
Dear Leon @ 12:30/1:30, you ask a fair question. My aversion to CAFE arises from my aversion to anything that substitutes the economic judgment of legislators for that of those with an actual stake in the success of the economic entity. I would allow the market to determine whether production of fuel-efficient cars is wise. I know that sounds like nonsense, as small cars are inherently more economical for the owners. Small cars inherently have smaller production costs, and will cover less overhead. For high cost producers (due to their labor contracts) such as the American car makers, there is no hope of competing with foreign name plates. Thus I would allow the American car makers to make only what is profitable for them, and they would thus yield the lower-profitability markets to their competitors. Win-win.
And dear Leon @ 12:30/1:30, your apology for slander is accepted. All who know me know that I own only mutual funds. I suspect the short-sighted thinker between us was the one who did not contemplate comparative production costs of the automakers.
And I amend my 1:33/2:33 answer to allow for Temp’s truthful clarification, the proposed legislation does not change the requirement for a secret election to decertify. Secret elections are appropriate in that case also – secret elections, where people are required to prove eligibility to vote, keep all parties honest.
Let’s assume for a moment that the right wing article of faith that says unions kill jobs is correct. What kind of jobs? Low wage jobs with no benefits or pensions. Currently, most families in this country who are “getting by” are doing so by having more than one wage-earner (or by having a wage-earner with more than one job). In the past few decades, there has been a massive increase in the number of women in the job market. Now, I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t be there if that’s what they want. But it would be nice if one parent or the other had the OPTION of staying home because one income was enough.
The increase of women in the workforce was just the first phase in the right wing’s war against living wages. And, ironically enough, it wasn’t even something they planned, In fact, many conservatives railed against it when it first started to happen. But they were more than happy to change their tune when they realized the benefits to be had from downward pressure on wages. Next came off-shoring. And for those sectors of the job market that can’t be exported because the worker has to be physically present in the country to do the job (construction, landscaping, house painting, agriculture, hotel maids, etc.), employers have discovered the joys of illegal immigrants.
Notice how plumbers and electricians haven’t been displaced by illegal labor on a large scale? This is partly because of the specialized training required, but also due to the existence of unions and licensing requirements.
As for the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, simply remove the incentive by adding a sufficient tariff for manufactured goods and services from countries that don’t have the same labor, safety, and environmental laws we have. The tariffs don’t need to be so high as to make it impossible for other nations to sell their goods here. Just high enough to remove the advantage of not having to buy safety and pollution control equipment and paying workers less due to the lower cost of living in other countries. Make them compete on quality and efficiency instead.
2 arrested in FBI raid at Obama appointee’s office
es tell WTOP.
Yusuf Acar, 40, an employee of the D.C. Office of the CTO was taken into custody by FBI agents at his home in Northwest D.C.
Sushil Bansal, President and CEO of Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation (AITC) was also arrested, sources tell WTOP.
In 2008, Bansal’s firm received .Net Development Support and Peoplesoft Consulting Support contracts from the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Office totaling $350,000.
CNN just reported that the guy who survived his swan dive over Niagra Falls has lost his speedo commercial endorsement deal for smoking pot. The olympics has also recalled and disqualified all his medals. (he got a 9.9 for his dive, btw)
It shows that everywhere you have strong unions, you have higher unemployment and lower wages. And the graphs also show that when you have weak unions, you have higher employment and higher wages.
The UAW’s fine example with GM, Ford and Chrysler are a perfect example.
Big union bosses are like government: monopolies that are unaccountable.
Carly N,
these libs don’t understand that the UAW has single handedly killed the American auto industry. Sam Walton was smart when he said that unions would kill Wal Mart. He’s laughing from his grave.
What union has design control any product?
It appears to me, the union members can only fabricate the product as designed and marketed by those in management.
Secondly, those areas that have low wages and are not unionized, such as Alabama, have those wages subsidized by the taxpayers. If you recall, the state gave the manufactures incentives to move to the state and provide approximately 2,000 jobs.
You indicate you have weak unions and strong wages. I would submit your numbers are wrong when it relates to wages. My research indicates the average for those weak union workers is roughly $15.00 per hour without extensive benefits.
Rag neither apology required, nor slander inferred. Not familiar with your investment strategy. Alas it was the automakers shortsightedness that led them to believe that $1.00 per gallon gas would last ad infinitum. Why else would they lobby so ferociously against CAFE? Tsk Tsk
If a unionized workforce and near-complete control of government by Democrats leads to happiness and prosperity, please explain the state of Michigan to me.
TO ALL THE CONSERVATIVES ON THIS BLOG WHO BELIEVE THAT ONLY THE WORKING POOR ARE LOOSING THEIR HOMES, DUE TO BAD DECISIONS. THIS GUY IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF SOMEONE WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SURVIVE, BUT I GUESS HE JUST LIKED LIVING THE HIGH LIFE. FYI.. Taken from an MSNBC article, with picture and a diary of what happened.
Rip Brown, 48, grew up in New England and, with a college degree and MBA, began a career in commercial banking in the 1980s. By the 1990s, married with two children, he was building a solid resume as a corporate controller for several Fortune 500 companies, including W.R. Grace and Wal-Mart. In 2005, he set up a global consulting business with clients in Europe and Mexico. But Brown’s fortunes shifted. In 2004, to pay for his daughters’ education, he borrowed against the rising value of the Boston home he bought in 2002. By 2006, unable to cover the cost of running his business, he declared bankruptcy but continued to pay on the house. In 2007, his mortgage rate jumped three percentage points to 11 percent, more than he could afford. Hoping to work out more affordable terms with the bank, he took on a long-term project in New York last year. In November, Brown’s client prematurely terminated the project after the banking crisis shut their credit line. Out of work since, his 18-month struggle to save his home finally ended in foreclosure on Jan. 29 at 2 p.m.
Such a broad political spectrum, almost a cross section, of Americans I’ve known or run across for 30 years have wished for a resurgence of a union movement that could make us vigorous again. Remember in the recession during the early ’80s when we developed a Shakespearean envy of the productivity of the Japanese, when every other paperback in the last-chance airport bookshops was preaching to us about what they had and we didn’t?
The answer then was dubbed “workplace democracy”; roughly speaking, workers informing the production processes as well as the product. It all seemed to make sense then, and I just assumed that anything Stateside that still called itself the Democratic Party would snap it up in a heartbeat.
Not so. I watched again and again as the Democratic leadership rejected planks that would nail down aspects of workplace democracy into the Democratic Party Platform.
And now I know why. They preferred to rig the game for their labor paymasters and paymistresses.
I’ve been banned by many blogs, andy. I tend to swoop into a blog and blow minds. I dont know why I do that. All I really want to do is make friends and have people like me.
But let’s look at these strange blogs on the AJC. Take today’s Wooten topic. In the first sentence, Wooten expects a reader to believe that he could predict which way this economy might turn and which administration would be responsible. The sheer arrogance could only foment from a bitter, confused, disenfranchised mind. Yet, I know for a fact that Jim Wooten is one of the nicest guys you can ever meet.
That brings up the new era we are all in. The era of tectonic group think. Global think. The internet has bound us all into one gigantic schizophrenic monster. We demand justice, but we don’t want to pay for it. We don’t even want to pay our taxes. Christians believe that it’s a sin to evade income taxes. Christ was crucified by men who were delinquent in their quarterly tax payments, you know. They had all received warning letters that very morning, and boy, were they in a mood to get even with someone…….
So God is a Keynesian Leviathon. I don’t know what that means.
Jackie, if you think that ragnar’s word-smithing, (”you would argue that those of us who would preserve the secret election for laborers are opposed to the laborers, and those of you who would abolish – either de facto or de jure – the secret election are protecting the laborers. A curious logic, that.”), is superb, then there is no hope for a real writer. Did you get a load of what the AJC presented as finalist’s editorials for the job of New Conservative Writer for the AJC? I’m I the only one who was dismayed? and shocked? and was I the only one who will write like a devil possessed by the illegitimate child of Keats and Yeats to punish everyone responsible for this travesty of journalistic ethic??????
I call this the “Yanni” effect. Yanni rose to superstardom with the most mediocre music I ever heard. People settled for it. Somehow. And the Yanni effect lives on these blogs. I’m sure Yanni got many emails and letters and even twitters of adoration for his Symphonic Cacophonies.
Rag is a Blogging Yawni, in every possible pun of that word. His measured ombudsmanship belongs in a crease up Rush Limbaugh’s dimpled butt, where rag’s nose for news is certain to be born again, him being such a crack christian and all……
Rag: you contribute so much to this blog. You’re always there. Commenting. We are inundated with your graceful turns. You have such a marvelously unexpected way with words. It would be a disservice to journalism if you were ever to let a few minutes go by without posting one of your 79 comments you apply to the common good each day on this poor blog.
We all wait, for the master with baited breath. What will he say next?
(camera to all lurkers everywhere showing faces expressing wide-eyed anticipation…….)
If the unions are so bad, why is the American manufacturing workforce the most productive in the world?
The American workforce works longer hours and takes less vacation than any other country in the world, yet, their wages are falling.
The American workforce is tied into a specific company because of health care, other benefits and pensions.
Other countries in the world do not have to concern themselves with health care as part of their overhead, therefore, their unit cost are lower. If one recalls, the USA has the MOST EXPENSIVE health care system in the wordl; not the best.
@cranky old man
“Let’s assume for a moment that the right wing article of faith that says unions kill jobs is correct.” I would rather state my article of faith as being, “A person and an employer are free to negotiate any and all terms of the job as they see fit.” If employees want to organize, by all means do so. If an employer wants to fire anyone who joins a union, by all means feel free. The choice and the freedom should be there for all.
“The increase of women in the workforce was just the first phase in the right wing’s war against living wages.” Surely you jest. The increase of women in the workforce was driven first by World War II (Rosie the riveter, et al) and then the women’s liberation movement starting in the 50s. Hardly a right wing conspiracy there.
The reduction in wages is simple economics. You have a large increase in available workers due to more women working, without a corresponding increase in the number of jobs.
As for off shoring, there is nothing sacred or special about the American worker. Why does a worker in India or China or the Philippines not have the same right to a job that you do? They work just as hard, have the same level of education and charge 1/3 the price. Why would I not offshore? Just as companies have to compete in the global economy, so do workers.
I certainly hope that if this legislation passes that the anti-union employees in companies band together and proactively inflict harsh violence and intimidation on the union organizers. It may be their only means of self defense in the face of what will likely be a wave of violence and imtimidation upon intelligent american workers who know better than to join unions. The history of the depression chronicles thousands of incidents of violence against employees once pro-union legislation was enacted. Look for either the same to happen or as many have rightly said – flight to more business friendly countries.
Jackie, Union memebership has never been lower. Most manufacturing jobs in this country are not unionized. That is why they are so productive. Look at the ones dominated by unions (GM, FORD, CHRYSLER)need I say more?
The Democratic Party seems to have become “democratic” in name only. Something like the German National Social Workers Party, which was certainly German and certainly nationalistic, but which was not really a party and which, above all, regarded “workers” as slaves of a despotic State; or, consider the fabulist moniker, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Today’s Democratic Party actively seeks to topple the workers’ secret ballot, the chief pillar of workplace democracy. What better proof do we need that the Party truly does “seek power for its own sake”, as Orwell put it, in this disgusting pecuniary exchange for the unions’ help in seating a new Democratic incumbent?
Barack Obama is as shameless as an old Emperor in new clothes getting older and moldier by the minute.
You are correct, union membership is the lowest it has ever been because most southern states have adopted the policy of “Right To Work.”
As you know, the quantity of people working in an facility does not equate to efficiency. It is the number of units produced in the least amount of time and with the least cost.
The union members of the UAW are in fact more productive than those at Toyota, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, Mercedes, BMW facilities. One can not equate efficiency of the product with the engineering as the workers do not have control over what is designed and why the design is such that it may fall off the auto after a period of time.
I think it is design obsolescence as to why so many of the past American products were so bad.
Four of the top 10 autos in the J.D. Powers ratings are from the Big Three.
Good to speak with you, but have to vehemently disagree with you.
The Democrats have many faults, but being National Socialists is not one of them.
If you have ever heard the term, “…either you take the jobs to the slaves, or take the slaves to the jobs” leads one to believe that the current movement of jobs outside the USA is by design.
As you know, one of the easiest way to directly affect the bottom line of the Balance Sheet is to reduce your Direct Labor costs.
I have argued that one of the most corrosive terms used in our business lexicon is Return On Investment (ROI). How and why do you measure this?
A eye-popping example of why the Repubs are one the verge of being irrelevant.
“To receive the full amount of stimulus money available, lawmakers would need to adjust the time period used to determine whether people are eligible for benefits.
Texas also is being asked to expand eligibility to include thousands of low-wage workers. Lawmakers have said the change would help part-time employees like single mothers, college students and senior citizens.
Perry’s decision comes despite warnings from Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Tom Pauken that the state’s unemployment compensation trust fund could be operating at a deficit by October. Pauken told lawmakers recently that insolvency might not be not far behind.”
Was this decision made to help the people or help the politician?
Keep it up Repubs, you have not run out of ammunition that you use to shoot yourselves in the foot. You might right out of feet.
Yo, so called “conservatives”: Why were unions formed in the first place? Anyone? Anyone? If you don’t like unions, then I suggest you work to ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR UNIONS.
Employees are well and fairly treated are much less likely to rock the boat and make demands on the Captain. It was slave wages, unsafe working conditions, inhumane hours, and the knowledge that no matter how hard they worked, they could NEVER get a tiny fraction of the rewards the boss was reaping for their labor, that resulted in the rise of unions in this country. YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW. That the “conservative” tactic is to lie, strong-arm, and use their bought & paid-for legislators to remove the thorn of unions from the side of big money indicates that the fight for unionization IS warranted. As usual, you prove the point while trying to disprove it.
Well, I am not an authority on such matters as discussed here today. But I always thought that unions were very good back when they were needed. Coal mines without safety standards, factory workers with low wages, long hours and bad working environments. Steel mills with little protection against obvious dangers. Unions were needed.
But time moved along and “business” got wiser (with uniion impetus) and saw that good working conditions meant better output. That investors not millionaires alone had something to say about working conditions. Times changed.
It seems to me that unions are now the fake dinosauers of today. They try to be big, step on companies, demand their rights and not the individual’s. But their effect on management is small when economic times are difficult.
Perhaps unions should concentrate on new goals to increase employment, not find faults with the companies supplying jobs. The government is strong enough to set standards. The unions can only quibble about them now and work for union power, even political power, but not necessarily worker power.
The american auto industry is not a good example of how unions affect our economic cycle. You’d have to live in Detroit in the decade of the Seventies to understand what the Unions meant to the American Dream. You’d have to pretend that the Great Depression and WW2 didn’t happen, or that the baby boomers in Detroit didn’t all eat a reality sandwich called, “you’ll have to forgive my parents, you see, they grew up during the Depression.” You’d have to imagine that Detroit wasn’t populated by upwardly mobile blue collar racists in the Seventies.
The Seventies: Power to the People. Right on! Far out! Got any Peyote? The Doobie Brothers. Dont Bogart that Joint, my friend. Happiness is walking to your neighborhood school (vs Busing). Pre-aids, sex was wide open, and never has sex been a ubiquitous presumption for dinner and a movie like it was in the Seventies.
What economic cycle is being deranged by unions? America is as America does. History is destiny. We The People are finally communicating in real time. 1776.com. Lafayette Twitter: “The British are a bore. They keep attacking us here on Breed’s Hill, and we keep killing them. Yet they insist on returning to close range, where we kill more of them and then they run back down the hill like little little baby bunnies. Oh darn, I went over the 25 words or less limit on Twittering. Cheerio!”
But the British went to the pubs and spent money that night. The economy there boomed. Get real. Don’t blame Obama for Bush or Ike or Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt or Garfield.
In fact, don’t do nothing. Just sit there and stfu. Que sera, sera, what ever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see……..Nobody saw this recession coming. Nobody except the end of the spectrum of bulls and bears that exist at any given moment.
I still say we’re pretty close to being on the same page here. What I mean is that there’s old-timey unionism — the muscle play, the bosses, the teriff-wall protectionism, the throwing around of pension funds and election foot-soldiers to gamble on temporary political power — and then there’s what we’ve long hoped for: a newer unionism based on the obvious need of workers to have a larger hand in decisions that shape their lives through the lives of the companies that employ them.
In American Law, are acknowledged to possess — because the unions won them, more-or-less fair and square — special consideration in the area of property rights, the principle concern of our federal Constitution. Chief among these special considerations is the right to collective bargaining, which was gained because a long succession of court cases found that labor unions have constituted something like the closest we’ve ever come, as a People, to direct democracy. Closer than the House of Representatives; closer than county, parish or city governance.
If we institute a new regime in which union membership, and therefore union votes, are dictated by intimidation, then the courts eventually will, I think, begin to roll back the right to binding arbitration. Binding arbitration is, by definition, a contract, and all contracts are, by definition, entered into volitionally by all parties.
I wish I’d edited that. I meant “principal” when I typed “principle”, and I’d meant to say, in opening the second paragraph, that UNIONS “…are acknowledged”.
Sorry. I get heated in these debates. So many hours, for such small wages…
Jackie, I want you to write, in 25 words or less, why you love being an American. If you succeed, then I will know that you understand the power of words. Then I will know that your appreciation of Rag has merit, other than being a cliche of a groupie wrapped in a grouping of cliches.
I gave you an example of rag’s problem. I used quotes. He wrote that bountiful feast of implication, inference, and deduction.
Be careful. This comment is a test and a trap, and if you fail, nobody will read you ever again.
Glenn, R U insane? I minored in psych and I gotta say, you need teams of psychiatrists working around the clock at the university level in Vienna. (Seinfeld).
When Lennon said, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” Bible-belt Christians roared with anger. They burned Beatles records, banned Beatles songs on the radio and boycotted Beatles concerts. They tolerated no rival claims to the messiah. When Limbaugh uttered a parallel claim, those who see Christianity under attack offered no response. No cry of cultural hostility toward religion was heard. No demand for an apology boomed from pulpits. No boycott was launched.
Why is that?
Why is it that the Christian Right reacted with such reverence to a man who, through thinly disguised humor, disclosed his prideful self-perception and espoused a worldview that counters the biblical witness? Are they afraid of Limbaugh? Are they afraid of his followers who pack their pews?
What explains the fact that Limbaugh can speak untruthfully, and yet he goes unchallenged by conservative Christians? He certainly spoke untruthfully at CPAC when he said that conservatives did not see other people with contempt. Yet he exhibited contempt in his comments about Senators Harry Reid and John Kerry.
When Limbaugh asserted that President Obama “portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night,” that he wants to destroy the United States and that he was fueling “class envy,” his untruthfulness went unchallenged. Limbaugh claimed, “We don’t hate anybody.” Yet he proceeded to speak hatefully about Obama, defending his statement that he hoped Obama failed, which was hardly endearing speech.
Sorry!
Trying to prove that I love America is a false negative, which can never be proven.
Secondly, my comments about Rag are an overview of how Rag constructs his sentences with vague innuendo and duplicity. As stated previously, one has to read his postings very, very carefully to understand what he IS NOT saying.
Third, I could never prove to YOU that I have an understand of words and their power.
California Democrat Has Championed Minority-Owned OneUnited on Capitol Hill and Criticized Its Government Regulators
By SUSAN SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — When Rep. Barney Frank was looking to aid a Boston-based lender last fall, the Massachusetts Democrat urged Maxine Waters, a colleague on the House Financial Services Committee, to “stay out of it,” he says.
The reason: Ms. Waters, a longtime congresswoman from California, had close ties to the minority-owned institution, OneUnited Bank.
Ms. Waters and her husband have both held financial stakes in the bank. Until recently, her husband was a director. At the same time, Ms. Waters has publicly boosted OneUnited’s executives and criticized its government regulators during congressional hearings. Last fall, she helped secure the bank a meeting with Treasury officials.
That’s not fair, Jackie. You protect a premise with a conclusion. No, a false negative is like a edible jockstrap. You commit to sodomy long before your soul gets the sugar rush. I wont be trifled with. Y do U luv America?
Answer true, or I call Homeland Security. U R A sleeper cell trying to trick the patriots who blog here.
Dear PoFo @ 4:36/5:36, “.Nobody saw this recession coming.” You cut me to the quick. I forecast the recession every day for a year after Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that the Bush tax cuts would not be renewed. I’m quite certain you even chastised me for saying the same thing over and over. Must I sew flags naked to be noticed?
You can Goggle because you are adept keyboard warrior.
@Chris Broe,
You can go play in the traffic, as I do not have to prove nor explain any thing to you. As for your snide conjectures, you have stated nothing more than what you fantasize. Are you still counting pervert?
You minored in Psych? Really? That must’ve been Home Ec. for you. They made me study that BS for seven — count ‘em, seven — years, and I never, ever saw a bigger pantload (excepting maybe the Developmentalists, and perhaps Jung). Still, I toadied, and bellied up to The Bar.
How could an honorable Cynic such as yourself so deign?
Horseslop.
gtg
P.S. Although Abnormal Psych seems always to have been robust, productive and full of promise. I’ll give them that.
Can anyone explain how we are supposed to believe PresBo?
Obama: Economic crisis ‘not as bad as we think’
WASHINGTON (AP) – Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.
Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation’s “confidence builder in chief,” Obama said Americans shouldn’t be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was “highly optimistic” about the long term.
Small independently owned businesses will find themselves targeted by union representatives if this bill passes.
In Michigan, it is common for businesses with only five employees to end up with a union.
This proposed rule would allow union organizers to take employees out to the bar, and after getting them all drunk, get them to sign the card check. And with that, the union is in.
Don’t think this won’t happen, because it is how unions operate.
Now that you’ve googled it, lets talk: what if 2,598 billionaires managed to thwart the six billions of people on this planet by using legal and constitutional means available to anyone so that they could possess and control 90% the wealth of the entire planet? That would not be justice.
Capitalism only works in the arena of war. We are systematically destroying ourselves. It only takes one country to launch a global nuclear war. We are sellouts. We write what we are paid to write. If we are to be financially successful we must pander to Common Sense Conservatism. The Common Sense Conservatism is whatever Wallstreet and the Bomb Industry pays the Wootens to say it is.
There is no way we can survive. We need war to show economic projections that point upward. That’s the only way to get to the top. That’s the only way that a properly-educated christian American can fulfill the American Dream.
We are as finished as completely as the Sioux Indians were finished, in 1876, when they decided to leave the reservation and attack the US Army’s Seventh Cavalry, who were only obeying our Constitutionally elected mandate to properly align our topographical demographics with the media-inspired Rush of Capitalization upon which our Christians riffed the justification of laws from which we distilled the disenfranchisement of our muddied multitudes: National Resources against National Population. The end game of Capitalism: the salt is worth more than the salt of the earth.
Well, Glenn et al, I’m here today 2 tell U 2 tell who ever sent U that we don’t just jury-nullify, but instead, we human-nullify your laws. U R obsolete.
Wooten, Glenn, and Andy, and JBMlaw: I suggest you conform to the human paradox: Is a human being a particle or a wave? That is, is one human worthy as all humans are worthy? Or, is one human only one human with some arbitrary vision of progressive potential, and damned be those who were in the path of the toxic dumps that never occurred to the opportunistic visionary?
Why do jackie, glenn, rag, and andy use the same exact syntax? Are they in the same boiler room/bar with laptops drinking and drunk-mob ruling? Sure reads like that to me.
You know you clowns represent the ideology that hasn’t worked for two hundred years. We get it: The economy is cyclical. Yes, capitalism is great when it’s great ( for a handful), but what about the masses? For two hundred years you’ve given us Bud Light.
It’s over. Just leave. I suggest Dubai. Cheney and Bush are Kings over there. You’ll be quite popular!
Obama is not the end of Conservatism. He’s the beginning of the end of Conservatism. Rag, you should be ashamed trying to mix analchord with compromised republicanism. You cant be me. I know that hurts. But you can levy justicefor all by foreclosing your own greed. You can be a living trust for trust itself. You can make a difference.
We face obliteration. Decide quick or sit next to me near the campfire. I’ve got the marsh mellows. Someone grab a guitar. Pass the bong. Lets just sing in unison till conservatism destroys us all.
Should there be billionaires? NO! Any profit over 100 million dollars for any individual should be taxed at 90 per cent. The death tax? 90 per cent! Yes! If someone dies, then he should forfeit what ever he earned to society. He’s dead! His offspring? Let them know the human experience of belonging to the times and the mass condition. Nobody deserves anything more than anybody else. Period.
I’m willing to civil war over it. I dont care what you think you deserve over me or anyone other american. Soon that sentiment will extend to the starving in Sri Lanka.
Mr. Wooten cites a report by Anne Layne-Farrar of LECG Consulting. The title of this study is: An Empirical Assesment of The Employee Free Choice Act: The Economic Implications. Perhaps The Associated Builders and Contractors sponsored the study, funny that she didn’t them. She did however acknoledge financial support by a gruop with the rather innocuous sounding name The Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs. This is a moniker that has spinmeister Frank Luntz stink all over it. Dig a little and the HR Policy Association turns up.
“HR Policy Associationbrings together the Chief Human Resource Officers of more than 260 of the largest corporations in the United States. Representing nearly ever major industry sector, HR Policy members have a combined market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and employ 18 million employees worldwide The association mission is to assist large employers in using their collective leverage of the membership to further critically important business and societal objectives.”(http//www.hrpolicy.org/about_indexaspx)
Wow a membership that uses a collective leverage. Sounds kinda like a union. Also sounds a bit like “don’t do as we do, do as we tell you to do.” A membership with 18 million employees world wide. I can see why unionization is a threat to their $7.5 trillion market capitalization, less money for $1 million dollar office makeovers with $1200 waste baskets and golden commodes.
In her study Ms.Layne-Farrer uses mathematics that admittedly are beyond my education level, but a wise man (the late Robt. Heinlein) once said “if you torture numbers enough they can be made to say anything.” A study financed by an association of 260 of the largest corporation in the U.S. that says unions are bad– I’ll try to restrain my shock and awe.
I was WAY too long-winded. I meant not so much “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”, as, “Pay no attention to what the Man’s been saying about the man behind Iron Curtain.”
“It’s the perceived threat of war that justifies facism, whether there exists a threat or not.” (W, 2002)
Kamchuk, nobody understood a word you wrote. Trust me on that one. Distill your comment into one 25-word sentence. I can.
Can U?
Communication itself is at stake. Try twittering. You are forced to be brief. They only allow 25 words or less. It’s the greatest thing to evolve from human communication. And guess what? I invented it.
Chris Broe
While I feel the need to agree with you, your postings at 3:19,4:36,6:44 and 7:44 seem to exceed 25 words. Again someone telling me “don’t do as I do, do as I say do.” That sentiment doesn’t inspire trust.
People can vent to the AJC and whine and moan, as if this really helps. Let your representatives hear from you and if they’ve made legislative decisions that adversely affect your life, vote them out of office next time you have the opportunity.
Good morning all. Mr. Buffet’s celebrated comments are part of a rising chorus. Our allies in France and Germany flatly reject President Obama’s big-spending approach to resolving the financial distress. Certainly we all deplore unilateralists, who refuse to listen to our noble allies, and perhaps President Obama will have the good sense to initiate a sea change in his irrational economic programs.
The Empty Suit is not above making a false analogy. As noted by Taranto yesterday, opposition to “embryonic stem cell research” is not an issue of ideology, but one of ethics. An honest statement by Chauncey would have been that he favors science over ethics. But that would have reminded too many people of Dr. Josef Mengele, and the leap from Mengele’s misleaders to other tendencies in the Obama administration would have been uncomfortably easy.
Chuck Sims made one strategic error. You can add a tax if you eliminate a similar one. Georgia would support full sales tax on all sales if the income tax were abolished. The House also got it backwards on the new vehicle tax, which I oppose. A smarter course would have been to impose 7% with no limit, but with a “forgiveness” of the first $500 of tax on each title. That would shift the tax to the most conspicuous consumers, and exempt the most modest spenders, and mostly eliminate the $1 sale frauds.
I think the justices of the California Supreme Court have to stand for election. And there is a history of recalling incompetent justices. Sometimes even leftists are compelled to accept the plain language of constitutions.
On the Ford/Chevy divide, while my father was always a GM man, I am biased to Fords, largely due to an almost but not quite indestructible 1994 Ranger we used to teach our sons how to drive a stick. Except that we now drive a Subaru, a Honda, and an ancient Mazda.
Congressional Democrats are not constrained by the rules of normal people – they are our overlords.
Fulton County is run by democrats, too.
Hear, hear, on the probation companies. I’ve had a long-time dark fear, and I had no idea how to penetrate the murk to look for corruption. The recent Wilkes-Barre judge corruption inflamed my suspicions. Private companies providing public services need public accounting, to ensure there is no quid pro quo. Clay Cox sounds like a crook, except that overlords are exempt from normal standards. He follows the example of Chris Dodd.
Larry Kudlow has a piece on NRO from yesterday that argues the nation may be moving out of the down cycle before a dime of stimulus money has been sent. What are the chances that the presses will be stopped and China will be given their money back? Hard to believe our “Old Europe” friends are more fiscally responsible than our current leaders. So called “conservative republicans” are as much to blame as democrats. Democrats cannot get to sixty without some GOP help.
CNN just reported that President Obama said yesterday that he would favor proposed legislation to ban future Octomoms if it would have prevented the Jonas Brothers.
The president did dance on “Ellen”, so his opinion is important.
Buffet declares an economic war! Another loose cannon! I cant see how that spin could lead us all into a slow slide into a Third World War, can you? If we can just get Americans to blame China, India, and the Phillipines, (the axis of payroll), then it will be easy to ignite a conflagration so vast and unstoppable that we’ll all know how Custer felt that fateful day on which he thought he could spin a victory out of unemployed liberals.
Dear Sane Jane @ 7:13, I thought my joke was a pretty clever riff on that constant drumbeat the leftist loons pounded for eight years. Obviously not as clever as I thought if it flew past you. I should just leave humor to PoFo – futile for me to try.
It used to be fun defending Republicans and berating Democrats. I’ve lost my mojo. The system is so sick and corrupt that I consider 99% of politicians totally useless. We’d be better off using Tarot cards, OUIJA boards or pig entrails to make our laws. When/will it ever end? Will our corruption eventually cause our demise?
The YouTube was a collection of bloviating (D) congressmen. Maxine Waters, in particular, reminds me of one of those incompetent schoolboard members who demands excellence from faculty, administration, students… yet hasn’t the foggiest idea how to accomplish that.
Mission accomplished Mr. Wooten – putting forth positions on a (sometimes) daily basis that are so blatently partisan; it can’t help but create fervor enough to respond.
Ford vs. Chevy – give me a break. I refuse to buy another American car for the rest of my natural life, and I don’t feel guilty because the foreign car companies employ lots of Americans, get their supplies from American small businesses, and seem to be better corporate citizens all the way around than their US counterparts in Detroit. I have a 10 year old Japanese luxury SUV that has 180,000 miles on it, never a problem. I’ve owned 4 Fords and 2 Chevy’s in my lifetime and once that odometer hit 50,000 you might as well sell it to Carmax.
Clay Cox must not have paid proper homage to Skin Edge, Matt Towery, and “Sonny-Do” and the rest of the Georgia Republican Cabal.
Wooten have Skin and Matt told you who to start pumping for Governor yet? Please, if they say Glenn Richardson, look deep into the mirror, you just can’t do that to the citizens of this great state.
And Ragnar, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to point out that France and Germany don’t have the $$$ to pull off an economic stimulus on the magnitude the US is, plus they haven’t been as exposed to the banking crisis over mortgage securitization because frankly their banks have much tighter regulations. Old Europe has a much larger problem at hand, they need a different type of “stimulation” since their population levels are falling and aging.
I agree with Why Bother. I like to think that if the Founding Fathers came back today, they’d be wondering why we hadn’t thrown all the effing bass turds out yet & tried a second republic. What number is France on again?
Say what you want about the frogs, but they know how to put heads on pikes, my friend.
If anybody anticipates a long, boring weekend with the prospective rain, urge you to pick up a copy of today’s WSJ. Took me two hours to read today. There must be 20 worthy essays therein, unusually interesting issue even by WSJ standards. Especially recommend the review of “Me Cheeta” and Rob Long’s amusing recommendations to The Empty Suit on gift-giving, “The President’s Diplomatic Gifts.”
Dear Funky @ 7:39, re France and Germany, the Europeans socialists are a futile decade ahead of The Empty Suit, so I take their cautionary as a sort of buyer’s remorse, much as Obama voters are beginning to feel.
Sane Jane, Rag,
You are so right!! I’ve been saying it’s time for a serious tea party. The insanity has got to stop, the lunatics are running the House and the Senate and it is very scary! I don’t give a flying clam which party you’re affliated with – they have all lost touch with reality! Can we just start impeaching them all and start over!
Our elected leaders should be required to endure “Question Time” with the day’s best political comedians: Maher, Miller, Stewart, etc. Let them be part of the vetting process to weed out the know-nothings.
Such a sad commentary on the state of our society when we need the court jesters to bail us out.
In pleading guilty Thursday to running Wall Street’s biggest and
longest fraud, Bernard L. Madoff admitted his guilt for the first time
in public, and apologized to his victims.
But his testimony was also shaped by his determination to shield his
wife and family.
As a result, those who thought his guilty plea would shed more light on
the Ponzi scheme left the courtroom unsatisfied and uncertain — about
where their money had gone and who may have helped Mr. Madoff steal it.
Swiss private bank Union Bancaire Privee, one of the largest European
hedge-fund investors, offered Thursday to buy back $700 million of its
clients’ Madoff-related investments at half what they originally paid.
An accountant working with some Madoff victims argues that the United
States government, which collected tax for years on phantom gains, was
the “single biggest beneficiary” of the scheme.
Ragnar, I believe you would have referred to JFK also as an “empty suit”. Hmmmm, well maybe an empty suit is what we need after 8 years of an “empty head”. Actually, give me 8 years of a fiscally conservative, progressive Southern Democratic Governor, paired with an ideological yet intelligent Republican Congress – America did amazing things from 1992-2000. Under that combination, we defeated communism totally (through our economy)and spread freedom, effectively ended a genocide in Bosnia with a multi-pronged approach (diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, relief, and cruise missles) defeated the welfare state (less than 0.1% of the population of Georgia received federal welfare assistance in 2005 – something folks that lived here in the 70’s and 80’s would have thought impossible), billion dollar budget surpluses, Georgia’s economy booming, New York making a magnificent comeback – the Falcons went to the SuperBowl (I’ll never forgive Eugine Robinson) and the Braves won a World Series.
By the way, world markets are up again today – come on Wooten and others, give me the good spin… come on lets hear it.
Berkshire Hathaway was stripped of its ‘AAA’ credit rating by Fitch
Ratings, which cited concerns about Berkshire’s equity and derivatives
investments, as well as Warren E. Buffett’s tight grip on the company.
Federal lawmakers pressured the top U.S. accounting rulemaker for new
guidance on mark-to-market accounting within three weeks or face
legislation to change the rule that has forced banks to record billions
of dollars in asset write-downs.
General Electric and its finance arm lost their coveted triple-A credit
rating from Standard & Poor’s on Thursday, as the credit-rating agency
downgraded G.E.’s long-term debt one notch. But G.E. shares rose amid
relief the cut wasn’t worse.
Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California, helped set up a
meeting in which the chief executive of OneUnited, a bank with
financial ties to her family, asked for special bailout funds, Treasury
officials said.
Trouble continued to grow in the yellow pages publishing sector, as
R.H. Donnelley hired Lazard to restructure its debt and Idearc
acknowledged that it may seek a prenegotiated bankruptcy.
JUST LIKE JIMBO AND HIS OLD REDNECK CREW WHO DONT WANT TO PAY AMERICANS THEIR FARE SHARE,WHO WOULD LIKE TO GET RID OF THE UNIONS SO THAT THE GREEDY CEOS CAN SLAVE AMERICANS AT LOW WAGES.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE LIKE SUXBY PERDONT JOHNNY BOY PHIL GIMMY ARE ABOUT,THEY USE THE SOUTHERN IGNORANCE TO KEEP THE GOOD OLE BOYS AND GIRLS BROKE STUPID AND BLIND.
Dear funky @ 8:21, I think any suggestion of similarity between Obama and JFK would be the triumph of hope over experience. While JFK had many flaws, both personal and in policy, we have to remember that single shining legacy, the JFK tax cuts. Clearly JFK understood (better than most contemporary democrats) the elements of job formation.
Obama has time yet to pull out of this suicide dive he has designed for the US economy. Everything he says sounds more like “higher costs for business” and “more restrictions for business.” Not very much hope for redemption there. To your point, however, think how much better the country would perform with President Phil Bredesen than with the current Empty Suit.
There are many here much smarter than me. What will it take to bring renewable energies to mass market? That industry now is dominated by hundreds of small companies that consist of labs and small test sites. What is the catalyst to get these technologies off the drawing boards and into the marketplace?
Dear Funky @ 8:21, your post prompts a couple of other observations. How were JFK and the Horndog different from President Jimmy (other than the obvious sex jokes – I’m comparatively serious here)? JFK worked to eliminate the socialist effect of segregation, thus freeing the economy to perform on merit alone. The Horndog gets credit from me for pushing NAFTA, which also freed the economy to perform. Each had a significant “freedom” initiative for the economy.
In contrast, President Carter was a “regulator” slapping government shackles on the economy right and left. In all fairness, Jimmy inherited Nixon’s disastrously-foolish wage and price controls – Jimmy’s great sin was failure to remove the shackles, thus allowing Reagan credit for that bit of genius. We can credit Jimmy with eliminating some few long-standing pricing restrictions – airlines, banking, trucking – but those were minor compared to his greatest omission, oil. Gas lines, coupled with the inflation that accelerated with his “social” spending, destroyed his presidency. Unfortunately President Obama shows no evidence of a capacity to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors.
Maniac (love the name), it all boils down to one thing – money. It has to be worth it. Energy pricing (oil, gas, etc.) have to get to such a level that renewables have to make economic sense to invest in. Two ways to accomplish that – setting an artificial price floor, like for instance gas would have to be at least $2.50 a gallon. Not a fan of that, but I do see the proponents point. The other way is just to wait for the market to take care of it, which eventually it will have to – no matter how much people think is actually in the ground, everyone agrees that supplies are limited.
Dear Maniac @ 8:54, What will it take to bring renewable energies to mass market? [The US has a long-standing blindness to the best renewable energy source ever discovered,](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html ) and widely exploited by other countries. If, however, you refer to some of the grossly inefficient pie-in-the-sky sources, you may have to repeal the laws of physics. Like that old comic that depicts a scientist standing before a blackboard filled with formulae, ending with “and then a miracle happens.”
Dear funky @ 9:08, I think I saw, not too long ago, a really odd but credible argument that oil renews itself. The physics were well beyond my competence, so I cannot represent the legitimacy of the discussion.
UNIONS ARE THE SOCIALIST SCOURGE OF A FREE SOCIETY! UNIONS ARE THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF THE BIG THREE ECONOMIC TROUBLE! THAT COUPLED WITH THE INSANE MANDATES PUT ON THEM BY OUR SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT WILL CONTINUE TO DEPLETE OUR ECONOMY! HOW IN THE WORLD DO YOU THINK THAT A BUNCH OF SCUMBAG LAWYERS IN CONGRESS CAN DETERMINE THE BEST CAR TO MAKE, THE BEST OPTIONS TO PUT ON THAT CAR AND HOW TO MAGICALLY MAKE THAT CAR EFFICIENT, LOW COST, LESS POLLUTING AND STILL SELL IT TO PEOPLE WHO DO NOT WANT IT! STUPID POLITICOS WILL RUIN US COMPLETELY! THE BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION IS TO BAN ALL UNIONS BY CONSTITUTIONAL AMMENDMENT!
Ragnar, good observations and I accept the criticism of Carter on the oil point, mainly because you unlike many others relent that Jimmy was dealt a horrible hand when he took over.
I would contend however, that with one utterance at the beginning of his presidency, I believe we may have the right person for the moment in the White House. When the Daschle fiasco unfolded, President Obama did something that neither President Bush nor President Clinton did, which was admit that he was wrong and took personal responsibility. Unfortunately too many leaders in all enterprises see that as a sign of weakness, whereas the people following them see it as a very positive thing.
This President has also tried to surround himself with the best people and take in differing viewpoints. I have yet to see a “Brown-y” on this administrations staff (could be there, but I haven’t seen it yet). However, unfortunately though some picks have been qualified, they have personal issues that basically make them unfit – although I think it’s humorous the same people railing against the arcane “tax-code” and all of it’s intracacies are the very same people demanding Obama’s appointments that made tax mistakes step aside.
I am of the mind we do not need an idealogue or a demagogue in the White House at this critical juncture.
“The reduction in wages is simple economics. You have a large increase in available workers due to more women working, without a corresponding increase in the number of jobs. “
“As for off shoring, there is nothing sacred or special about the American worker. Why does a worker in India or China or the Philippines not have the same right to a job that you do? They work just as hard, have the same level of education and charge 1/3 the price. Why would I not offshore? Just as companies have to compete in the global economy, so do workers.”
Well, here are a few problems I see with that:
1. Businesses are off-shoring, in part, to avoid having to obey safety and environmental regulations. Even if such laws exist in the countries to which they export the jobs, they are often not enforced, either as a deliberate policy to lure businesses, or as a result of bribery. Pollution, left unchecked, will eventually affect the entire planet.
2. This practice does at least as much harm as good for most of the people living in the countries to which the factories are re-located. Yes, I am aware that most Third World subsistence farmers would gladly take a job in a sweatshop working 12 hours per day with no break for $1.25 per hour, because it’s still better than subsistence farming. But, as soon as the local economy starts to improve enough that the workers realize what they are missing and start agitating for better wages, the businesses re-locate yet again to the next untapped market of cheap labor, leaving the locals out of work, and now without their farms to go back to.
2. These businesses have been built using the resources of the United States, much of it funded with our tax dollars. Every business benefits from roads, bridges, canals, ports, law enforcement, fire departments, etc. The workforce that built these businesses was educated in public schools. The founder and the executives may have gone to college on the GI Bill. And now, having taken what they can from our society, the businesses abandon their responsibilities to benefit a few fat cats at the top, leaving the workers who built the businesses unemployed and local economies devastated.
3. Something else I’ve noticed is that free trade fanatics seem to think it’s perfectly reasonable for businesses to take advantage of the difference in the cost of living to hire cheap labor. But, apparently, it’s not okay for consumers to take advantage of these same differences. Remember a year or two ago when there was such a stink about people getting drugs (the legal kind) from Canada because they were cheaper? Oh, no, we can’t have that. American consumers are our captive cash cows. Another example is DVDs. I found this out when my sister (who lives in Europe) sent my wife a DVD collection. The DVDs won’t play on an American DVD player. So we watched some of them on my laptop. But guess what? There is a limit to the number of times the software is allowed to switch back and forth between US and European compatible DVD formatting. And I’m not talking about anti-piracy software. These were legally purchased DVDs. But, the thing is, due to the difference in the cost of living around the world, movie distributors who charge $20 in the US can only charge, say $4 in Indonesia. So we have to prevent some industrious Indonesian entrepreneur from buying legal copies and shipping them back to the US to sell for $10 each.
“Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California”, isn’t she the 1 who said the CIA was selling drugs to blacks to fund a secrete war in central America? We have some real nut cases in congress including ours, on the bright side she was helping her husband not Saxby’s Lobbyist Son.
No, we don’t have a idealogue or a demagogue in the White House. We have a Chicago community organizer with a gift of charismatic gab attached permanently to a teleprompter.
Obama had no need to apologize for Tom Daschle. Daschle was the one who did not pay his taxes, not Obama. But it did sound so sincere for Obama to say “I’m responsible!”. All his sycophants, like you, immediately said “How sweet!”
You said that the President surrounds himself with “the best people”. Last night Lehrer News Hour interviewed the new US Education Secretary. His credentials: he played basketball with Obama, “transformed” CHICAGO schools BUT their ratings never rose. The new Secretary did say he liked Bush’s education policies. Maybe he won’t be a “Brownie”. He definitely will be an “Obamie”.
Americans do not want their taxes raised. They also want officials to pay their taxes just like all citizens are required to pay. Obama’s tax policies have changed, reduced, raised, qualified, explained, unknown, and become questionable. Americans are queasy. They know they are about to be DRAINED. Not by Madoff but by Obama. He has skipped over many of his promises already. Another one would not be surprising.
Americans have little confidence in Washington these days. When the big celebration was over, the fairy tale was not reality. It is not a pretty sight.
Thanks. Funky and Ragnar, I refer to wind (both big and small), non-food source ethanol and biodiesel, electricity from solar (beyond just solar panels on the roof), tides, etc. It seems like many of these technologies are “this close,” to being mass marketable, but are stuck at first base. I can’t wrap my mind around how capturing energy from nature hasn’t really made the leap from lab to Main Street by now.
Jim, I found myself lost in the tubes with no time to go searching. Nice to find your thoughts up and running. ‘Twas Charles in Charge, trolling the bridge who pointed me in the right direction and to him I say, THANK YOU CHARLES! I can only take so much of Bookman, The Left-Handed Super Nanny’s admonitions.
To Warren Buffett I would say “AMEN!” Obama putting the empty cart before the donkeys will leave us stranded on the road to RECOVERY. I’ve said before that Obama’s timing sucks. In the instance of his spending policies, I’m not so sure it isn’t intentional. I think he suffers from a head Rush off at the pass. He’s a One-Uppity kinda guy. No matter whether I use the word “arrogant”…..”peremptory”…..”cocky”, they’ll still read it as “uppity”. To them I say “UPPITY THEIRS”. HE is what HE is and you love it.
His administration must have assumed <a href=”http://www.patriotpost.us/opinion/charles-krauthammer/2009/03/13/using-embryos-without-limit.html” the guy in the wheelchair would be so flattered by the invitation, that he could be duped into believing that “Using Embryos … Without Limit?” was a good thing?
—”Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned — and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived — human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.”—
I challenged a guy over at Bookman’s to speculate as to the unintended consequences of expanding on embryonic stem cell research. Silence….couldn’t wrap his tiny brain around such huge consequences, I guess.
Scientists have not made it practical. Warming up in the sun was known by cave men. Don Quixote and Dutchmen knew about wind power. Sailors as far back as the Vikings knew about the tides. Livestock knew about the green grass. Making it work for millions requires billions and even Al Gore could not invent that much. Give’em time. They will get blood from a turnip and energy from soda pop. I love scientists. My family is full of ‘em.
“If mark-to-market accounting is to blame for the current financial crisis, then the National Weather Service is to blame for Hurricane Katrina; if it hadn’t told us the hurricane hit New Orleans, the city would never have flooded.” Opening lines from an excellent assesment of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, hope Ranger can get at this..
Dear GA Values, good afternoon. Perhaps you misperceive – mark to market is not “to blame” for the financial crisis, it merely exacerbates the problem. CRA is “to blame.” “Mark to market” merely makes it worse, by compelling banks to reflect a zero value for assets with real income production. The silly mis-accounting rule incorrectly reflects banks as insolvent, and the incorrect reflection compels (by law) mindless bureaucrats to close the banks. One government lunacy feeding another, feeding another.
Maybe if Jim had spent his early years expanding his education instead of listening to Chevy-Ford debates he’d know the difference betweeen science and ideology. Hick.
The facts have been for 8 years the Republican’s have lied to America and the world about Science. They were in charge when the economy went to heck in a hand basket, and now they don’t want to be team players….and they hope America gets worse not better.
Are Republican’s really American ?
“President Obama is the front man radicals have long needed”….this stupid comment says all…….after having a Republican President make up a WAR, and Bankrupted America, Jim makes this statement.
I guess making up a WAR is Not Radical in Jim’s mind….. he likes all the Killing and wasteful spending.
Gee 8 years of Republican’s bilking America, and Jim wants all problems fixed in a few months !
I do feel Congress, and the House should not get a Pay Raise, but should take a 10% pay deduction for all they have done over the last 8 years, basically nothing.
Anyone noticed how Obama’s opinion poll is dropping like a lead balloon? Anyone noticed that 41% this nation now believes that Algore’s global warming scam is just overhyped junk science (according to Gallup – and that’s up from 31% in 2002) ? Anyone noticed that leading economists have given Obama & Geithner (the tax cheat) a big fat **F** for handling the economic situation? Anyone noticed the hypocrisy of Nanny Pelosi (Ms. Drain The Swamp herself) and flying around on USAF aircraft on a whim’s notice? Anyone notice that when Obama has a speech before the media he turns his head constantly from left to right while talking into each teleprompter to make it appear that he is actually speaking from memory and actually talking to the audience? Anyone notice that Obama will not attend this year’s Annual Gridiron Dinner next Saturday, March 21st, and will be the first president since Grover Cleveland not to attend the first Gridiron Club Dinner of his presidency? Anyone notice that left wing Jon Stewart get his panties in a wad over CNBC’s Cramer slamming the Democrats (very deservedly btw)? Anyone notice Obama’s comment that the national crisis is “not as bad as we think”? Finally, has anyone noticed the main stream liberal DNC media IGNORING just about all of the above? In a year Obama will have outspent Bush in eight years, INCLUDING Iraq. Now which one of you mindless hysterical liberal sheilas are going to come out of the powder room and start whining about “hate & anger speech” in retort to this? Please, don’t let us down, moonbats.
World markets are up because some good news from Ford who is doing what they need to have been doing all along to show they might have a clue how to lead themselves out of the woods, without a government handout. News of the huge drug company merger brought some more good news to the market.
The little uptick in the market doesn’t have anything to do with the Prez or the House. Most people I know and work with are just not that confident in what Obama, Vice President Pelosi and company are doing and believe less of what they are saying!
In fact, many are laminting that if McCain had been the McCain we’re seeing right now the outcome might have been different! The American people are not on board with being taxed to death to supplement bad business models, greed and more pork. The passing of this recent bill with all the same old “ear marked” pork that Obama promised to eliminate. It didn’t take long to break that promise!
I’m with you Jane and Rag, the biggest problem we still have in this country is the partisanship. People have got to stop laying on the tracks and dying for a damn party. Both parties as an entity have huge faults and both parties are completely out of touch with reality and the people!!
More people need to vote across party lines for the BEST PERSON FOR THE JOB, period. Forget the stupid PARTY. It needs to cease being either Dem or Repub and just be a government that actually represents the people. Not the special interests who feathered the campaign nest and to whom they are then indebted.
In fact, each candidate should only be allowed to spend say $2 mil on their campaign, period. Where the money comes from must be made public each time a donation is made and no more than $2 mil, period.
This approach would certainly put a lid on the contributions that lead to favors. It would also eliminate a lot of the media circus, because you’d blow through your budget in no time advertising on cable! Get out there and really mingle with the people in town halls, you might just learn something about what they people want and need.
Our Government should not be made up of movie star, rock star glitz, but that’s what happens with the mega-millions being spent on campaigns. We get a lot of hype and bias from the media outlets and unfortunately that’s how most people make their selection. He who gets the most airplay, wins.
Our government needs a serious reality check and so do we. As another poster put it, we elected them. If we are not pleased with what they are doing, then we need to let them know and let them know often and loudly enough to be heard, if they continue to NOT listen, then lets get out of there, quickly.
Dear GA Values @ 11:41, I don’t know anyone who looks at asset value when buying a stock. Most of us look at income and growth potential. The only people who care about a bank’s asset values are the FDIC and the chartering authority.
Most haunting quote of the week, from Geneva County, Ala., Deputy Sheriff Josh Myers, whose wife and daughter were among those killed in a shooting rampage a day earlier: “I cried so much yesterday, I don’t have a tear left in me” writes Jim Wooten.
It’s almost impossible to discuss an otherworldly topic if people have only worldly experiences. I thank God for the privilege of being allowed to know both. It was Brian Gene Nichols, the Fulton County Courthouse shooter, who attempted to discuss the otherworldly with psychologist, investigators, and prosecutors; but his efforts were all for naught. Nichols said that he was not responsible for assaulting five people, severely beating a deputy to the point of permanent brain damage, and executing four people. But it was the demon that possessed his body. Now practically everybody thought Nichols’ confession to be a ploy to avoid the death penalty. It’s via experience alone that anyone can appreciate Nichols’ confession.
The word is that Michael McLendon, the Alabama rampage shooter was somewhat depressed about job issues, but the available information doesn’t specify that his motive was job-related. And even if the motive was specified as job-related, they would be sadly mistaken. Similar to the courthouse shooting in Atlanta, most people in Alabama don’t know what motivated Michael McLendon to kill ten people.
I have sympathy for Deputy Sheriff Josh Myers during his time of tribulation. If Myers is a Christian, he should take the time to pray. Oh people of God what needless pain we bear. And it’s all because we don’t carry everything to God in prayer. If Myers isn’t a Christian, he should seriously consider becoming one because the days are evil. But the good news is greater is Jesus that’s in Christians, than the devil that is in the people that love the world and all that it has to offer.
Excellent post “Charles”, The Original! When I read Jim’s last paragraph, I thought how easy it would be for Deputy Sheriff Myers to lose his compassion but it can always be re-discovered in God’s love for him.
Some thoughts about the California Supreme Court’s adjudication of that state’s Proposition 8, banning gay marriage. To my gay friends: I counsel patience. Cold comfort, I’m sure, but the very best I can do.
This mess is largely the making of one man, California’s Chief Justice Ron George, who almost single-handedly foiled repeated attempts by voters to set it straight (as it were) that government, if it is to recognize marriage at all, should recognize only the matrimony of one woman with one man. Believe me, the fix was in from the start, and Mr. Justice George was Chief Fixer. When Judge George says that “maybe the solution has to be a political one”, what he’s really saying is that he’s come to realize that he must flip-flop on this one, and side with the masses this time instead of, as before, with elite politicians sympathetic to gay rights. He’s an exceedingly political jurist, ever with his finger in the breeze.
I predict that the decision will go 5-2 or even 6-1 to support the ban, and that’s just the way it goes with pragmatist jurists who can read the writing on the wall. I’ve never considered Justice George a principled person, only an ambitious one.
Not so, Associate Justice Kennard. I suspect she regards this thorny mess much as I do: as a thicket of Ron George’s making. She will, I’m sure, write the opinion for the Majority. Regardless of whether you agree with her forthcoming opinion, I consider her a jurist of the utmost conscientiousness and fairness. She is a true lady of the Bench.
Now, going forward. As I say, patience. There is geologic time, there is historical time, and there is anthropological time. These things take time, and they don’t turn on a dime.
I once was thrust, as Legislative Director to the Chair of the first state judiciary committee to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, into the midst of this divisive, rather tragic issue. To say nothing of incessant phone calls, leters and emails, I was besieged daily with delegations of persons, mainly clerics, who argued passionately both sides of the issue. As well as anyone I’m aware of how deeply held are the beliefs of both sides.
All along I’ve argued that the sensible thing is to take government “out of the marriage business” by limiting government’s role to that of certifier of civil unions, in recognition of the contractual duties and privileges attaching to couples willing to commit themselves wholly to each other’s welfare. That would leave it to religious institutions to sanction “marriage” itself, and if Catholics and mainline Proddies want to limit the sacrament to heterosexual coupling, then so be it; let gay couples find a sympathetic Unitarian church or Reform synagogue, etc.
Of course, this is a pragmatic approach to jurisprudence, but then Mr. Justice Holmes was the first Pragmatist judge, and he was a smart cookie. I bet on Judge Kennard, not Judge George, to inherit the Holmesian mantle here, and to open the door to landmark legislation that will restrain government from indulging in religious affairs while leaving it up to faith-based institutions to decide what to do with the coveted title of marriage.
Not part of Jim’s Free-for-All but disconcerting given Obama’s troop surge into Afghanistan.
I knew Nawaz Sharif would spell more trouble down the road in Pakistan.
—Major demonstrations shaping up in Pakistan could lead to clashes between the ruling Pakistan People’s Party and the opposition led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and its lawyer allies. With the economy weakened by the financial crisis, and with Islamist insurgencies raging inside Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan, the Pakistani military will have a difficult time stabilizing the situation, especially on its own.—
Hmmmmm…can’t do it on its own, eh?
—It is unclear whether intense 11th-hour efforts will prevent a showdown between the government and the opposition. If the efforts fail, then the result will likely be continuing demonstrations and clashes in the streets between protesters and security forces, which would force the military to step in and try to reboot the system with a new government, possibly some form of civil-military hybrid.—
Pakistan’s president is, today, offering concessions — power sharing. Sharif, long time friend and associate of Osama Bin Laden, offered this response:
—Sharif denies he has latched on to the protests as a way to gain personal power or bring down the government, insisting he wants to strengthen Pakistani democracy. However, in an interview with a local TV channel, he warned that by holding out on the judges, Zardari may have to exit his term early.—
—”I don’t think he will be able to complete his five years,” said Sharif, a former prime minister.—
—Aside from black-suited lawyers, the call for an independent judiciary has drawn together some unlikely bedfellows, including human rights activists, leftists wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and Islamist party activists seeking to benefit from any new political order.—
Would you look at ^^^ that! Obama supporters’ beloved Che is all the rage in Pakistan.
Tres chic!
Glenn:
I thought California has, for some time, offered legal rights to gay couples through the Domestic Partnership Law. The majority of Americans are in favor of civil unions. Gay couples are making this a lot harder than it needs to be.
No one who is religious has an understanding of ethics. Religious people indoctrinate others into believing “truths” about things that they do not really know to be true. If you tell someone that something is true but have no evidence to support that proposition, you are lying. To do such a thing would be unethical, so all “believers” who attempt to spread their faith are therefore unethical. But you model yourself after one of the famous intellectual lightweights of the 20th century, so I would expect you to have trouble with logic and have actually seen your challenges with it in writing.
Jim, these disappearing and reappearing posts are a problem in this new format.
I’m not all that computer savvy but, DANG!……is it that difficult to correct the problem or are we/I being admonished like at Jay Bookman, Super Nanny’s blog?
I left Glenn a question and I WILL NOT ask it again?
Dear One @ 3:02, no one who calls himself one voice can have an understanding of logic. One voice people present epithets as logic, attempting to make people believe name calling is “argument.” If you tell someone your epithets are logic. but have no basis for the commentary, you are a doofus. Lighten up, Nazi! I simply made a joke about Obama, riffing off your mindless name calling. Your lockstep true believers in The One are a threat to society.
Yes, @@, that’s quite true. But it goes back to the Brown decision: “’seperate but equal’ is inherently unequal.” No one on the CA Sup. Ct., as best I can tell, underestimates the damage done by the fey withholding from homosexuals of the state’s acknowledgement of actual marriage. The situation as it stands is made the more poignant when one is faced with the fact of so many homosexual couples there, especially lesbian couples, striving as valiantly as anyone to rear children as best they can.
The status quo in California is tantamount to what jurisprudentialists call a “feat of nomenclature”, and so the Consitututional principle of Equal Protection rears its head. That, in a nutshell, is the issue before the Court.
It truly is much the same as the seggregation issue that confronted the U.S. Supremes in the 1950s. As I said, a thorny thicket. A mess.
I agree with your implication that gay-friendly lawyers have made the mess, but then many of those lawyers have been judges, in train with well placed legislators. Our home state’s highest court now finds itself, once again, in the position of having to untie those knots which it, itself, tied in the first place. Just as it once had been, for the entire nation, with deseggregation.
As I put it about five years ago, “a bloody Solomonic mess”.
As the day wears on, I thought about your Chevy-Ford discussions. What fun to look back and remember times when discussions were personalities in projection and faults were foibles. Who had the greatest truck that unquestionably ranked FIRST? Or who was the most persuasive? (Or who could tell the biggest lie??)
To tell the truth, I even had a older family member who loved his Dodge. Had to get a new one every year, always a silver one. He racked up more miles than most country doctors making house calls. And he made every trip in his Dodge.
No Dodges at my house. But discussion prevails. I am a Chevy person, the blueblood car of the nation. Not just a Caddie. A sweet little Cavalier which makes my menfolks snicker. I love it and defend its honor frequently.
So what do I hear? It is not great like a Honda. Toyota’s never wear out. Balderdash! Nothing beats my Chevy. No problems. Good mileage. I even get it shined up occasionally. AND it is AMERICAN MADE. A winner!!
So what do I hear? If they build a better car, I’ll buy American. Bah, hunbug!! I tell my family. Nothing beats American. You’ve been fooled!
But now I hear a somber drumbeat. A funeral dirge for the Chevy? Say it aint so. No no! My Cavalier may get tired and no way to get a new Chevy? That is like Popeye without spinach, Burger King without burgers, the colonel without chicken….I can’t face it.
Well, I may survive but the going will be tough. No Chevy? I may curl up in a corner…hmmmm…what’s the price of motorcycles these days??? Really? How about bicycles??
Another question for you….on the subject of gay adoptions…
I’ll preface it by saying that I believe committed gays are fully capable of offering a loving environment for children. Matter of fact, there’s a lesbian couple at my church who presently have three children from previous marriages (I’m assuming to men). They just had a baby. I’m not inclined to ask how. Here’s the question…
Since a small child (baby) has no voice, do you think it’s fair to throw them into a family dynamic that they may one day find uncomfortable? It’s a question I’ve struggled with for some time. You know me…..kids first!
I have not posted many times today. When I did, it came right up on the screen.
I think several people posting at one time makes it seem disjointed. Everybody is not talking about the same subject. So a question and answer may have various subjects in between. I don’t know the cure for that. At this hour, maybe something to warm the cockles of your heart!
Too bad you don’t understand Accounting, when you write off bad investments you reduce earnings, stocks sell for a multiple of earnings. I’ll try to write at your level.
Yes, indeed: kids first. I guess I’d say, frankly, that gay adoption is better than foster care but not as desirable as a two-parent, heterosexual environment that is loving. The situation in California and in so many like-minded states is that that that train has left the station.
Since you raise the issue in an ecclesiastical context, allow me to remind you that the theme of surrogation saturates the biblical texts, both Hebrew and Greek. It’s therefore a question of ontology: who really is the true parent?
Some years ago a dear friend of mine in San Francisco, fresh from her indoctrination at an elite women’s college (Mills) and fresher still from a horrible jilting at the hands of a man she loved (the monologist Josh Cornbluth, may the Good Lord strike him dead), decided that a better option would be to become a lesbian separatist. She asked whether I’d join her other, remaining male friends in becoming a sperm donor, as she’d given up on men an marriage but not on her longstanding ambition to become a mother. “You don’t need a man to have a child”, was her rationale. (Her remark was so in sync with the zeitgeist that you probably can pinpoint the very year of the remark within a standard devation of 12 months!) My answer to her was, “Yes, that’s right: you don’t need a man to have a child; you need a man to father a child.”
Of course I never donated. Aside from my religious upbringing, the thought of the sticky magazines at a clinic in Noe Valley just somehow didn’t make it for me…
Merciful Percival! I hit refresh, and Jim’s site is splayed all over the place — plastic to plastic on my CRT. It wooks so BIG!
Glenn:
Thank you for your H…..U…..G…..E contribution.
I would also prefer it to foster care. Not to say there aren’t good foster parents out there but the motivation to be one and the desperation to find one can, all too often, result in a failure to thrive environment.
To be honest, it was when I encountered the exceptional three from the two exceptions that I began to say to myself….”Hey! You know what this could work.” The three are perfectly well-adjusted kids — the oldest being a 17 year old male. If they can come from a heterosexual family dynamic and adjust as well as they have to a gay family household, who am I to make the call?
The latest, rather funny, glitch at this end is that when I clicked on “Refresh”, the texts came out in a nearly illegible script font, rather than in this nice, new, clean sanserif.
Also, how are we supposed to set things in italics now, or in bold? Without those features, I fear I may regress to what PoFo once dubbed my UNABOMBER mode, just so’s I can place the emPHASis on the right SylLABle, as I unspool my prescriptions for the unDOing of those who, like Queen ElizaBETH and Henry KISSinger, would steal PARTS of our idENTities…
You remind of Michael Palin’s hilarious riff, in “The Meaning of Life”, on the dotty don leading the English schoolboys in morning prayer: “Oh Merciful Gawd, you are so very BIG, so rully rully HUGE, gosh, we’re all teddibly impressed down here, I don’t have to tell you…”
As a product of Anglican schooling, I’m afraid I worried the movie-goers with my uncharacteristic and uncontrollable laughter at that parody.
Oh, and Glenn? A father figure can come in the form of a mentor. It’s the norm in our society where the absence of “dear old dad” is the norm. Big Brothers — Big Sisters. I love those commercials where the little guys are rolling their eyes at the prospects in essence saying “Well, he’s not perfect. Could use a little work, in fact. I’m just the kid for the job.”
I swear, Glenn, when you make comments like the one about the sticky mag, you “sound” to my eyes like PoliFore.
So an internet name tells you about someone’s ability to use logic? I suppose god told you that. No wonder you’re a “believer” with a thought process like that. What is particularly amusing is that you apparently don’t understand the moniker.
But the connection I made concerning your name is one you obviously intended, and your Ayn Rand nickname is clearly a representation of your ideology and a sign of low standards in literature and philosophy. But if you want to talk about logic I’d put my education and background as a researcher up against yours any day.
Do you know what we’d call someone who complained about name calling and then called someone a Nazi? A hypocrite. That would be you.
And you use the word lockstep a lot but apparently don’t understand its meaning. Lockstep would indicate someone who ignored evidence and instead conformed with the status quo of some underlying ideology at the expense of reason. Again, that would be you. In November you swore that McCain would win Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida and win the election. Why? Because that’s what you heard on Faux News, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary. Another example would be how you hold religious views (opinions) over the mountains of evidence for natural selection and the expansion of the universe. You see, when we look at the “data”, it is clear you are the one in lockstep, following the delusions of the uneducated, and unable to process evidence adequately. Cheers.
Well, thanks I guess, @@, as he’s really a master stylist, whereas I was just trying to call it as I saw it — a far easier challenge.
I’m completely consonant with your empathy toward surrogation. One of my first posts ever — and by definition it was on this blog — objected to someone’s breezy assumption that “role models” need be of like and kind. That’s a silly assumption, as I’m sure you’ll agree. The writer Richard Rodriguez made this point, pointedly, about 25 years ago, and I knew Richard then and gave him a great slap on the back. It needed saying, that we take our mentors where we find them; or rather, if we’re lucky, they take us. Take us for a great ride.
Thank you for a lucid, cogent argument that needed evey word that you used– proving that two and a half bumper stickers of twittering is insuffficient in a civilized conversation
Dear Glenn @ 3:23, I share Elton John’s view. If one has “domestic contracts,” one has all the rights of marriage without the name. Why inflame traditionalists for the sake of their symbolism? For the proponents of Prop 8, this is an “our traditions” issue, and for the opponents it is an “in your face” issue. Going beyond the symbolism – which drives both sides – there is a more substantial issue that is harder for me to reconcile. Health care. This is all about AIDs, at bottom line.
The “limit the definition of marriage” people are horrified that THEY are expected to cover the horrific costs of those who engaged in deviant behavior. The “marriage is between two breathing entities” crowd, however, has a legitimate argument, that the core purpose of health insurance was to spread the costs among as wide a field as possible, and that ex post facto limiting the scope for an unknowable risk is itself vicious if not perverse. There is legitimacy in both views. If we had a state AIDs pool, the passions on both sides of the marriage issue would calm instantly.
Dear GA Values @ 3:59, too bad you don’t understand the original purpose of accounting, which was to reflect values honestly. “If there is no market for the asset, its value is zero even if it throws off 6% of par value” is out of touch with reality.
Bookman just put in a comment on his blog that Bob Barr was NOT the new conservative columnist. Seems Barr is just starting up again where he left off at election time. That “not” makes both of us feel better.
My comment: “In a year Obama will have outspent Bush in eight years, INCLUDING Iraq.”
Libtard Peter’s retort: “It will be 3 Trillion for the WAR alone….”
(the fact that the libtard didn’t refute anything else I posted is duly noted btw).
Peter the libtard needs to read up on some facts and not rely on the New York Slimes and PMSNBC for his “Facts”. My advice to you, moonbat, is to lay off the sauce of liberal DNC media claptrap.
Here’s how the Washington ComPost explains it:
“By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz”
“Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page B01″
“There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can’t spend $3 trillion — yes, $3 trillion — on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.”
“The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly — surpassed only by World War II.”
“Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month — $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.”
So the DNC media libtards are speculating, not FACT finding JUST like our friend “Peter.” Oh the humanity! Let’s see what the Iraq war is REALLY costing, shall we? Straight from the CBO in FY dollars:
2003: $0
2004: $75.9B
2005: $85.5B
2006: $101.7B
2007: $133.6B
2008: $153.5B
2009: $54.1B (bridge to date)
For the libtards on the short bus like “Peter,” here’s the CBO’s quick list:
“Funding for Each Operation. According to CRS estimates, Congress has
appropriated about $864 billion for Iraq in budget authority (BA) from FY2001 through the
recently passed FY2008 Supplemental for DOD, the State Department and for
medical costs paid by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (P.L. 110-252).”
estimates that this total includes about $657 billion for Iraq (76%),
Liberalism is idiocy. Idiocy is liberalism. It is proven on Wooten’s blog daily. The truth and facts are out there. People who vote Democrat don’t seek them nor do they care to, because liberalism is born, bred, fed, and grown on ignorance and mindless emotionalism.
Finally, to drive the point home, notice how “Peter” did not take on anything else I said in my 11:56AM on Friday.
Well, I about run over a Chevy Cavalier on the way home yesterday but I could tell it wasn’t Sister Dusty. It had a Obama sticker and a Peace sign and librul stuff like that. I would of been worryed if it had a Bush for a Third Term or a No Taxes sticker.
Anyhow, Ford trucks beat Chevy trucks hands down. I wouldn’t part with my Ford F-450 for all the luxury trucks in the world. I ride up high in style and when people look at the size they think it’s kind of a way of saying I got a big You Know What. I look at the little cars and trucks on the highway and kind of sneer. I bet my truck cost more than my trailer. I see lots of people that think the same way. People wearing suits and ties and driving pickups that look more like tractor trailers than pickups.
Well, it’s another one of those days you have to spend indoors. It’s even too wet for a four-wheeler race up the hillsides. So I’m just staying indoors with some fried pork skins and a couple cases of PBR to see if my Dawgs make the NCAA tournament. I kind of doubt it. The last I looked they were coached by one of Those People and Tech got the same problem. It’s OK to have Those People playing because they can jump and run good, but not coaching because they can’t think as good as the rest of us.
I sure hope this Bob Barr ain’t the new Conservative writter at the AJC. He’s a Trader to us Conservatives for crittersizing My President back when he was in office and God was still in the White House.
Jim, this is for your and other conservative bloggers who are against alledged socialism.
“Yet as Bluestone’s analysis documents, that’s exactly what state government already does. It transfers a significant amount of wealth from more affluent areas of Georgia to less affluent areas, a transfer that is perfectly natural and appropriate.”
The above quote is from a GSU study on the expenditure of Ga’s tax dollars by the present Repub regime. It appears that we are already socialist, by your definition. And this is occurring not only under the repubs watch, but also with a repub legislature and Gov!
This should end ALL consrvative drivel concerning Obama’s economic policies and Socialism, shouldn’t it!
Thanks, Ragnar. It doesn’t take much effort to find the truth out there. First the libtards whined about Faux News exposing liberal lies and failures, and now it apparently is the good ‘ole internet. If you haven’t heard, the Obama nazi police have stripped Wikipedia of any negatives and have a tight lock on who updates the Wiki entries. We can expect more of this type of liberal left wing Obamanchuriancandidate mentality in the near future:
“A perusal through Obama’s current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama’s most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year. Even more to the point, his background in Chicago politics and how he got involved in said politics – and the seemingly concurrent rapid rise to power – is not referenced.”
Hall County is lining up its sixth pay by the penny proposition to provide funding for basic public services. They have yet to complete, or even start, all that was promised in phase five. The country bumpkins have learned well from their metropolitan cousins. The outsiders will help pay for the schools and roads we need. The poor and the illegals will finally pay their share for the government that serves us all. And should this proposal fail we will be consigned to gridlock with ignorant children because we were too cheap to give just one percent more on our daily purchases. We could not enforce our own development laws and have the A-List developer’s pay for the public improvements that enrich them; especially when they happen to be the county commissioners and their large land-owning families…
And if anyone thinks my comments about the Obama administration are hyperbole, I submit this latest example as evidence of what we are in for. Anyone getting in the way of this madness of a growing Marxist state (”socialism” is such a meaningless and benign word in describing what the modern moonbat liberal left wants for this nation) will be swiftly dealt with:
“The Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched an investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona following requests by congressional Democrats and allegations by liberal activists that the department has violated the civil rights of illegal aliens.”
“Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Robert Scott (D-Va.) requested the investigation, and activists groups such as National Day Laborer Organizer Network and ACORN launched petition drives and rallies in support of the probe.”
“The investigation focuses on Sheriff Joe Arpaio and dozens of officers under his command who were trained through the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS), which partners federal and local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws. (The Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division is known popularly as ICE.)”
“…16,000 inmates were determined to be illegal aliens. Either they have already been deported or will be deported after being tried and/or serving their sentences for crimes committed in the valley. The work being done be Arpaio’s detention staff is a likely contributor to the recent reduction in crime in the valley…”
Cliff Notes version: the libtards are pi$$ed off that Maricopa County is doing its job on unlawful immigration, and the result is future Dimocrat voters are being sent back to where they came from, and therefore Maricopa County must be stopped at all costs.
By John Feehery, worked for the House Republican leadership from 1989 to 2005. He is the founder of The Feehery Group, a strategic advocacy firm, and blogs at http://www.thefeeherytheory.com.
“I was talking to a Republican mayor of a fairly large city in the southern part of the United States, and the subject of earmarks came up. He was a big fan. “It is a lot easier for me to get the attention of my local congressman than it is to get the attention of a bureaucrat here in Washington.”
And that is the fundamental conundrum of the Republican attack on the earmarking process.
Lots of Republicans not only love earmarks, they rely on earmarks to get the attention of an indifferent and sometimes hostile bureaucracy.
Getting rid of earmarks is not only impractical; it gives way too much power to the executive branch.
Earmarks are a small, but essential, price to pay to protect democracy and our form of representative government.
Our nation’s founders bestowed upon Congress the power of the purse as a reaction to the absolute power of King George and his fellow monarchs. But what good is the power of the purse without the right to actually direct some of the spending of the president.
Undoubtedly, Congress has abused their power to spend the people’s money, and unfortunately, corruption has become all too commonplace.
But the reaction to this corruption should not be the wholesale abdication of power to an all-powerful executive.
Rather, Congress should reform its spending ways to rebuild the taxpayer’s trust in the process.
First, it should insist on transparency. Last-minute deals to add special little projects, all to buy votes, should be prohibited.
Second, it should insist that the committee of jurisdiction authorize all appropriated projects. The authorization process should be revitalized to give each and every spending request the scrutiny it deserves.
Third, no member should be given the power to be able to both authorize and appropriate spending projects. The temptation is simply too great when members have that much power to spend taxpayers dollars.
Fourth, the Congress should use an outside accrediting agency (perhaps GAO or the CBO) to give a seal of approval that the spending requests are in the national interest, and not just in the parochial or private interest of the requesting member.
Of course, earmarking is not something that happens only with the Appropriations Committee. The Transportation Committee (because of the unique way it spends money from its various trust funds) and the Ways and Means Committee (tax provisions) also have been known to compel the bureaucracy to do things it might not normally do.
All of that is completely appropriate when it is done in the national interest. It is completely inappropriate when done at the behest and for the private benefit of a special interest.
That the earmarking process needs reform is obvious. But reforming earmarks will not suddenly make Congress fiscally responsible. In fact, as has often been mentioned before, earmarks made up only a tiny percentage of total spending in the budget. And the Congress can take out every earmark, dedicate those savings to deficit reduction, and still not make even a minor dent in the huge budget problems that face the nation.
But that doesn’t mean that reform of the earmark process is unimportant. The people have lost faith in the Congress because it has spent like a drunken sailor for far too long, on projects – like the infamous Bridge to Nowhere – that don’t pass the laugh test. If Congress can come up with a process on earmarks that can help restore faith in the institution, by insisting on transparency, on a vigorous authorization process, on a dispersal of power, and on outside accreditation for all spending, it will be in a better position to tackle the truly big spending issue of the next 30 years, the dangerous growth of entitlement spending.
Republicans like John McCain and John Boehner are right to shine a spotlight on the broken congressional spending system. But the answer is to fix that system, not give all the power to spend to President Obama.
A lot of Republican mayors, county executives and governors don’t want to just rely on the good graces of an Obama administration, no matter how much they might like the president. They are relying on congressional Republicans to help with their spending requests. It is neither good politics nor good policy to ignore those requests and give all the power to the executive branch to do with the money as they see fit.”
GA Values: you have a hard time understanding the point of this?
‘“Claims have been made,” he notes, “regarding the potential geographic imbalance between the revenues generated in an area and the public expenditures received.” His research, therefore, is an “attempt to document these flows.” To what purpose? That is clear. To establish conclusively and finally that metro Atlanta is entitled to more state money. This is, after all, the dirt that accounts for 61 percent of state revenues, while it receives 47 percent. Those 28 counties — metro Atlanta as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau — hold 54 percent of Georgia’s population.’
Seems pretty clear to me.
Let’s take the first quote to the local level within Atlanta:
“Claims have been made,” he notes, “regarding the potential geographic imbalance between the revenues generated in an area and the public expenditures received.”
That would be those in north Fulton, and specifically, those living in areas like Vinings, West Paces Ferry, and unicorporated areas of north Fulton who have already or are working on being incorporated like Johns Creek & Milton (and yes, their incorporation and separation from Fulton County gubment being “racist” has been duly noted). I can’t speak for roads in the latter two, but I do know that roads and Fulton County police patrols in and around Vinings and West Paces Ferry SUCK. Where is all that tax property money from those gazillionaire homes going?
You just have to love this. Oklahoma, if memory serves me correctly, was once home to Obama’s mother and grandmother. (Side note: watching the libtards drool over Bristol Palin having broken up with Levi Johnston is very entertaining – our current president’s mother was an unwed teen mom). Anyway, on to the news. This, from the libs at the Washington ComPost of all places. That’s right Mr. “Bring Change To Washington!” Blame Bush when the reality of being a president sits in:
By Scott Wilson
updated 4:51 a.m. ET, Sat., March. 14, 2009
“In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
“It hasn’t taken long for the recriminations to return — or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome “inheritance” of its predecessor.”
“Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems “inherited” from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The “deepening economic crisis” that the president described six days after taking office became “a big mess” in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hey Nancy, someone left a message stating that the swamp you drained is rising again. LOL.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh but wait, didn’t the OH TEAM state earlier this week that the economy isn’t as bad as it is being reported?
Why yes my child, they DID:
Mar 12 05:49 PM US/Eastern
By JIM KUHNHENN
Associated Press Writer
“WASHINGTON (AP) – Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.”
“Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation’s “confidence builder in chief,” Obama said Americans shouldn’t be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was “highly optimistic” about the long term.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No, you cannot make up this kind of schizophrenia. GREAT JOB AMERICA!!!!
Has anyone else noticed the schizophrenia of the Obama administration?
Exhibit A:
By Scott Wilson – Washington Post
updated 4:51 a.m. ET, Sat., March. 14, 2009
In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Obama has strengthened his rhetoric gradually. Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said the administration’s “sharpened language is a response to the Republican argument against Obama based on huge deficits and big spending.”
Six days after taking office, Obama kicked off an event on jobs, energy reform and climate change with “a few words about the deepening economic crisis that we’ve inherited.” He lamented announced job cuts at such economic mainstays as Microsoft, Intel, Home Depot and Caterpillar, among others.
Just over a week later, Obama, arguing for his stimulus plan, said that “we’ve inherited a terrible mess,” and a few days after that, in the economically depressed city of Elkhart, Ind., he told the audience, “We’ve inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression.”
Exhibit B:
Mar 12 05:49 PM US/Eastern
By JIM KUHNHENN
Associated Press Writer
“WASHINGTON (AP) – Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.”
No, you cannot make this kind of stuff up, and don’t look to the libtard media like CNN’s “No Bias, No Bull” laugh-in.
Obama’s mother was not a teenage mom. She was married to Obama’s father in Hawaii.
As for Bristol Palin, a vast majority of the “liberals” do not take issue with Bristol, but with the Repubs using her to further their cynical case.
President Obama should make everyone aware of what was passed by the Repubs and Dubya. Obviously there is a big desire for the public to have a major bout of amnesia.
Sarah Palin: You can’t be proclaiming against stealing when your own hand is in the cookie jar. And to use an unfortunate decision by your child to try to further your own standing is dispicable. Her son (he is off to war! Forget why he had to join up), her daugher (she WILL be marrying the boy. And notice, she DIDN”T get an abortion. ‘Cause we are all about “family values”), and her youngest son (See, I didn’t abort him!) All that seems so cynical to me. If you claim the higher ground, you need to be sure you can stand on it.
findawg, are you still under the misunderstanding that there are any folks, other than monks and the dead, who DON”T pay property tax directly or indirectly? And that there is a special line at Walmart for the illegals so they don’t have to pay sales tax? And that those working for businesses don’t have income tax withheld? And that it is the WHITE MAN who hires them under the table?
Personally, I just voted against an extension of the SPLOST. I think Board members should have to explain and justify their decisions to the electorate, rather than having the candy bag open for their hands. And I am not at all happy with the use made of money on other splosts. SPLOSTS help elected officials stay elected. I say, let them run on their records.
“Obama’s mother was not a teenage mom. She was married to Obama’s father in Hawaii.”
Jackie: thanks for proving my point of how mindless and emotion-driven you liberals are.
A quick review of FACTS is in order here, as usual when dealing with a libtard. Here is what I posted:
“(Side note: watching the libtards drool over Bristol Palin having broken up with Levi Johnston is very entertaining – our current president’s mother was an unwed teen mom).”
Moonbat: she got pregnant while not married as a teen. That is a fact. Exactly what part of that FACT do you libtards not understand? But unlike you moonbats, I’m not holding that against her. Her son turned out quite well, albeit I don’t agree with just about everything that comes out of his teleprompter-driven mouth…
Amanda Ripley reported in Time magazine: “On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama’s parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II . . .
“The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. ‘I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?’ Obama wonders. ‘I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more.’”
Barack Obama Sr. left Ann and their son in 1963, and she married Lolo Soetoro, the presidential candidate’s stepfather, in 1967.
Source:
Time Magazine
Okay, I retract my comment: an unwed teenage conceptual mother. The point here is that the libtards are having a heyday over Bristol’s break up. Period end of story.
On to more important news. Let’s see if the libtards at the DNC media will start squawking about THESE jobs going overseas under Obama’s watch (my wild off-the-wall guess is HELL NO – more “change” we can believe in, folks):
JPMorgan Chase to Increase India Outsourcing 25%
America’s second-largest bank plans to spend $400 million on work outsourced to India to streamline its IT operations
By Pankaj Mishra
Businessweek
Economic Times of India March 9, 2009, 7:47AM EST
America’s second-largest bank plans to spend $400 million on work outsourced to India to streamline its IT operations
The second-biggest bank of the US, JP Morgan Chase, which acquired Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns recently, will increase its outsourcing to India by 25% this year to nearly $400 million. It will also manage the integration of the acquired companies from India to bring down the cost of integrating different information technology (IT) systems.
Right now, JP Morgan outsources $250-300 million worth of IT and back-office projects every year to Cognizant, TCS and Accenture, apart from to its own captive centre in Mumbai.
“JP Morgan CIO Guy Chiarello said last week that he will increase outsourcing to India, and will drive several integration projects from there,” a New York-based expert, familiar with JP Morgan’s outsourcing plans, told ET last week, on conditions of anonymity. A spokeswoman for JP Morgan India could not reply to an email query sent by ET on Friday, and the bank’s spokesperson in the US too did not reply.
“JP Morgan is one of the first banks in the US to have fleshed out its outsourcing
strategy ever since the banking meltdown happened. Many others are still undecided about their IT spend,” said a senior official at one of the technology firms, who did not wish to be quoted.
The bank, which cancelled its $5-billion outsourcing contract with IBM in 2004—following the merger with Bank One—had brought back around 4,000 IT staff in-house after the new CIO Austin Adams had proposed a “do-it-yourself” strategy for the merged entity.
“In this economic environment, Mr. Chiarello, the current CIO, wants to ensure that he helps JP Morgan meet cost-reduction goals,” the expert added. With large global banks like Lloyds TSB and HBOS, and Bank of America & Merrill Lynch merging, India’s top tech firms, including Infosys, TCS and Cognizant, are bidding for at least three $100 million-plus contracts.
As these banks merge, they face a huge task of integrating their software applications, consolidating their data centres and other trading platforms into a single entity, so that their customers are able to transact without having to face any merger-related issues. And since offshoring will help them save costs by 30-40%, these merged banking entities are seeking to partner with a vendor having significant offshore presence. “Apart from looking at cost-saving opportunities, such as offshore outsourcing, these banks also want to partner with their existing vendors because they would know the systems better,” said a consultant on condition of anonymity.
As reported by ET recently, Lloyds TSB—which merged with HBOS—is seeking partners to help the merged entity integrate its retail and wholesale banking systems through an IT platform. The company has already outsourced its HR functions to Xansa two years ago, in a five-year deal.
Oh wait, I’m not done yet! More “change” we can believe in folks! Let’s see, this time, it’s the “change” of the arrogant Bush administration who thumbed his nose at foreign nations and Obama was going to fix that. Well, here’s your fix, Obamabots:
From Times Online
March 10, 2009
Cabinet chief lambasts ‘incredibly difficult’ Obama team over G20
Britain’s most senior civil servant has complained that Downing Street is finding it “unbelievably difficult” to make arrangements with the United States for the crucial G20 summit.
Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, reportedly said that the handover to the Obama Administration was hindering discussions about the meeting in London next month.
The Prime Minister hopes that the summit on April 2 will produce a co-ordinated global strategy to tackle the economic downturn.
So far, his attempts to get his Washington and European allies to agree to a coherent common platform for the meeting have proved frustrating.
The G20 nations, which represent about 90 per cent of world economic activity, include not only the traditional G7 members but the European Union and emerging economic powers such as China and Brazil.
Mr O’Donnell said that No 10 was having trouble even getting in touch with key personnel at the US Treasury department. “There is nobody there,” he told a civil service conference in Gateshead. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.”
His comments come after Downing Street was left frustrated by the White House’s chaotic handling of Gordon Brown’s visit last week. No 10 aides were left scrambling when the President’s staff changed press arrangements at the 11th hour.
As usual, you so-called conservatives try to extrapolate, obfuscate and issue plain BS when you get your knickers in a knot.
You stated clearly that Barack Obama’s mother was not married to his father.
Secondly, she was not a teen, but a graduate student in Hawaii. I think that would put her past the age of 21, don’t you think SLOW MOTION?
Secondly, you have the right to disagree with anything you choose, but, someone like you should be careful with what direction they choose as it appears you have been led down the primrose path only to find that all the other sheep had jumped off the cliff.
The teleprompter being used by the President is readily available to you, if you choose to run for office and is somehow elected. Care to try?
Look who’s all upset at a menial point on Obama. Jackie! Go figure with all the other FAILURES of the current administration.
“You stated clearly that Barack Obama’s mother was not married to his father.
Secondly, she was not a teen, but a graduate student in Hawaii. I think that would put her past the age of 21, don’t you think SLOW MOTION?”
I stated that Obama’s mother was an UNWED TEEN MOTHER – at the time – which I restated and corrected. I backed that up by a Time magazine report. Now, whether or not you libtards want to define the definition of “mother” or not is not up to me. Me, personally? I find a pregnant woman a MOTHER of said unborn child. But, if you libtards want to split hairs on technicalities, knock yourselves out.
“you have been led down the primrose path only to find that all the other sheep had jumped off the cliff.”
Maybe you missed that part where the OH TEAM has received a GRADE F!!!!!! for handling the economic situation. And sheep? Please. Don’t lecture us on sheep falling off a cliff after the election last year, moonbat.
“The teleprompter being used by the President is readily available to you,”
Any idiot can speak publicly with constant teleprompters in front of him. The difference is Obama depends on them and when he gets caught off guard, it shows.
And ANOTHER point on Obama: why is information on his background SO. HARD. TO FIND?
For Jackie the libtard: The internet is your friend, you mindless hysterical liberal MOONBAT:
“Obama Sr. eventually told Ann about his first marriage in Kenya, but said he was divorced, which she would find out years later was not true.[19] Dunham was three months pregnant at the time of her marriage.[1][3] On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child, Barack Obama II.[20]“
Yeah that’s right, Nanny Pelosi, you drained that swamp well with that broom of yours…
March 13, 2009 – 6:20am
FBI raid at the office of D.C.\’s Chief Technology Officer.
Mark Segraves, WTOP Radio
WASHINGTON – An employee of the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer and a private contractor were charged with corruption Thursday after an FBI raid at the former office of one of President Obama’s appointees, Vivek Kundra.
Kundra is on leave from his White House job until further details of the case become known, a White House source tells the Associated Press. Kundra has not been linked to Thursday’s raid. Yusuf Acar, 40, acting chief security officer of the D.C. Office of the CTO, was charged with bribery of a public official, money laundering, wire fraud and conflict of interest.
Earmarks for the Kennedy legacy. Huh. Will there be a display of a sunken car with a dead intern in these earmarks? Are these the same type of taxpayer funds that libtards b*tched about Reagan & Bush I over for legacy acknowledgment? Yeah, thought so.
BOSTON – More than one out of every five dollars of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys.
The bill includes $5.8 million for the planning and design of a building to house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The funding may also help support an endowment for the institute.
The bill also includes $22 million to expand facilities at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and $5 million more for a new gateway to the Boston Harbor Islands on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a park system in downtown Boston named after Kennedy’s mother and built on land opened up by the Big Dig highway project.
This is an elegantly written and well considered column, Jim. For my money it ranks with your best.
As you know, I have qualms with Georgia’s pursuit of the Quality Education Model, the so-called “adequacy model”. It is simplistic to think that we could arrive at a dollar figure that would pay for an “adequate” education for every child; moreover, I doubt that the Governor and General Assembly, or any of their consiglieri, could do it. Oregon failed to do it credibly. So did California.
When Leland Stanford opened his university, he insisted that it be operated tuition-free and that its enrollment be limited to destitute males. One of his trustees, a fellow robber baron, remarked that the plan constituted “throwing a four thousand dollar education after a four-dollar boy”. Some pupils cost four dollars to educate; others, four thousand.
In the rural counties transportation costs — big bus fleets — run necessarily high. In relatively impoverished areas, the feds backfill big chunks of school funding with categorical programs, with AFDC and free and reduced-price meal programs. In troubled urban districts it’s often necessary to increase teachers’ salaries to attract and retain good frontline educators. On a somewhat subtler note, it seems ludicrous to bill taxpayers to teach literacy to privileged suburban children who come to school already knowing the basics. Costs do vary according to what happens above the dirt. More importantly, they vary according to what happens within the individual human mind and heart.
Your second educational point, a call for vouchers based on the adequacy model, is I’m afraid equally simplistic. I laud your objectives and your tenacity, however, so let me try a tangent on you.
How about issuing each pupil an educational credit card, redeemable at qualifying points of service delivery? The card could be loaded up, or not, according to the individual’s education needs and progress. Believe it or not, the mag strips on the back of our actual credit cards contain a great deal of surplus memory capacity: they are capable of holding a good deal of data. Were pupils issued such cards, the cards could contain information on the student’s individual learning plan, on her academic progress and history. Students dislocated from a given educational setting — students who move for reasons ranging from intra-district transfer to disaster evacuation — then could rely upon the card for a measure of educational continuity.
I take Jim’s point to be that we’d be better served were the leaders to take us on a path of border-to-border, comprehensive statewide finance and planning that would knit Georgia together in a way that the current hub-and-spoke model does not (Metro being the hub).
As for infrastructure planning, I’d still like to learn what General Sherman had in mind. He’d cared as much about Georgia’s reconstruction as MacArthur did about Japan’s; he was a superb engineer and logistician; and he was an expert in transportation, once Georgia’s strong suit. I’ve always construed things historically, and have found it useful, at least to people of my bent, to begin with a specific historical context and to move forward from there, so as to learn how we arrived at this pass.
I’ve been over here on four separate occasions, Jim…..every time I’m reading something between the furrows that makes me laugh. Maybe it’s just me suffering from cabin fever.
Anyhoosiers, equal disbursement? All planting should occur after Good Friday….or so say the old plowers.
Uh Oh! The Pakistani Interior Ministry has warned Sharif of an impending threat to his life. Granted, this could be to discourage his appearance at protests against the PPL but Prime Minister Gilani immediately ordered “foolproof” protection to Sharif.
Even so, the threat that jihadist groups might assassinate top political figures is very real — and the implications thereof are very grave.
The jihadists have an interest in creating anarchy, and there is no better way to do this than by killing political leaders — especially leaders like Sharif, despite his reluctance to take a tough stand against the jihadist insurgency. After Bhutto’s death, Sharif became Pakistan’s only leader of national prominence.
Assassinating Sharif would trigger riots, especially in Punjab, his home province and the largest province in the country. The resulting chaos could help the jihadists expand their insurgency from the Pashtun areas in the tribal belt and the NWFP to Punjab, which is close to the South Asian country’s troubled northwest and home to its own brand of jihadist groups that enjoy a significant social support base. Security in Punjab going the way of the country’s Pashtun areas would represent a significant blow to the cohesion of the Pakistani state, and a significant security threat to neighboring India.
Yep a statewide approach is needed badly. Too bad that for 7 years now and now doubt it will be 8 years, that Georgia has done very little to improve the transportation system of the state. Meanwhile other states have poured many into transportation recognizing the beneficial economic impacts and the consequence of a better life for their citizens. Meanwhile Metro Atlanta is now known for its transportation gridlock and less than desirable place to locate a business. The focus seems to stay on issues of morality, which although important providing only a guide to conduct our affairs in good stead, it does not create markets and will not help Georgia compete in a world economy.
“Claims have been made regarding the potential geographic imbalance between the revenues generated in an area and the public expenditure received…attempt to document these flows…out-of-state and out-of-region visitor spending did not significantly affect sales tax collections in fiscal year 2004.”
Mr. Wooten: You quote two and a half sentences of “an exhaustive (what about this study exhausted you?) study” that you offer no link to. What is clear to me, using only what you quoted from the study, is that Mr. Bluestone is attempting to address “claims” (who made these “claims”? Does he identify these claimants? If he does why don’t you cite them?) of imbalances. What is not clear to me is the motive “to establish conclusively and finally that metro Atlanta is entitled to more state revenue” that you ascribe to Mr. Bluestone. This may well be his motive, but that isn’t clear to me without having read the study in its’ entirety. Mr. Wooten, you also make claims that this study is funded by public money (is this supposed to be a bad thing? Public money being used to find out where public money is being spent sounds better to me than contracting it out to a for-profit company with possible conflicts of interest with competing clients). Again you make these claims with no substantiation.
“Bluestone’s research is superb and the data rich. It establishes conclusively, for example, that the voters are being hoodwinked by those who push local option sales taxes…” Is “hoodwinked” the word he used in his study or are you putting words in his mouth? Again, the two and a half sentences you quote from this study establishes no such conclusion.
The only conclusion that I can make is that you are using this study for another reactionary claim of OH MY GOD! I cannot BELIEVE what THEY are doing to US now. This talk radio (us good, them bad) mindset has framed debate in this country for thirty years. For thirty years voices have been marginalized, villified, demonized and its owners have been called godless, secular-humanist traitors. One of the changes that our new president brings is hopefully a change in the frame of the debate, where we can disagree with civility.
To: Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg,
Just wanted to let you know the Fulton County Police Department only patrols areas in their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction in unincorporated Fulton County. There are no unincorporated areas north of I-20 or in the city of Atlanta. So, it would seem it’s your local police department’s patrol that suck. You may want to contact your mayor. Thank you.
Thirty years of a binary program has left you in a perpetual state of prepubescence. I quit playing cowboys and indians when I got my first pair of long pants.
CNN just reported that the piece of space debris that almost took out the space station was actually an Iraqi Shoe. The man should get three years for this. Who are those guys?
Did I hear somebody say “change?” The word is too mild. Try “train wreck,” if you are a Republican. “A new beginning” may fit your feelings better – if you voted Democratic in the last presidential election.
In either case, I have the feeling our political nation is about to be turned upside down. President Barack Obama has drawn up a national to-do list that may require an administration of miracle-makers to accomplish.
The country is on the edge of owing a horrendous debt created by the Democrats to rescue us from the economic chaos of the previous GOP presidential administration.
Workers in the steel mills and auto plants of America may feel a faint hope. After years of decline, American-made cars and steel could be poised to bounce back on the strength of a bailout.
If you’re from the Midwest, you may feel a rush of opportunity springing from the energy crisis. Vehicles fueled with the equivalent of corn liquor could save us from the oil barons.
The great universities of New England and California may be free to enter a new era of scientific research that will propel America to the head of the line in healing and preventing diseases.
It may take a year or two to determine whether the new dreams for this democracy can materialize: whether we can make better cars and more money, whether we can teach our kids to be as smart as the Chinese or Indians, whether innovation and creativity still are bywords.
And it may take a year or two to determine whether the American South can bounce back as the region of new dreams and endeavors. Scanning voter statistics from the last election, one would have to conclude the South of 2009 is in about the same position as it was in 1929: running short on leaders and long on dopes.
Unless Obama’s scenario for the future changes dramatically, the South is not going to play much of a role in the reinvigoration of a nation.
Few Southerners and almost no Georgians have been tapped for leadership roles in the Obama administration. That is hardly surprising. Obama drew relatively few votes from Georgia and other Old Confederate states. America may have shown it was ready for a black president.
The South, and especially Georgia, demonstrated it was not ready for a Barack Obama.
In the early days of his administration, Obama signed an executive order rescinding President Bush’s restrictions on using public funds for stem cell research. Before the ink was dry on the order, Georgia’s Republican leaders drafted a proposal to prevent government-funded stem cell research in the Peach State.
So much for the dreams. Georgia’s best minds once had envisioned Georgia and much of the South as leaders in stem cell research.
We forgot an old axiom: In the South, when scientific findings clash with Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy always wins.
In much of the country, the election of Obama as president is regarded as our most remarkable political outcome in years.
In the South, however, the “most remarkable” certificate went to the Republican Party. Overnight, the Grand Old Party turned into little more than a regional organization with a one-word motto, “No!” Many of the same Republicans who constructed the trillion-dollar national debt in just six years are now staunchly on the side of frugality.
At least one Georgia Republican left an indelible mark in our history books. Rep./Dr. Phil Gingrey sharply criticized radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh for publicly hoping Obama would fail as president. Then a panicky Dr. Phil, realizing he had taken issue with the GOP’s generalissimo, hastily apologized.
At press time, a duel for the Republican crown appeared to be shaping up between Limbaugh and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is credited with coining the phrase, “Kill all Democrats.”
Back in Atlanta, remnants of the old Republican Party shook their heads in disbelief. Georgia Republicans had not been viewed as such political oddballs since moderate Republican challenger Newt Gingrich of Carrollton ran against incumbent Democratic Congressman Jack Flynt of Griffin back in the mid-1970s, and lost in a landslide.
Seriously, would you please strive to make your more muscular comments, which comments you might make a mite less adorably?
Yes, and I’m quite sorry. But it’s rather distracting.
All of which is to say: there’s something about your intelligent naturalness that makes your writings unusually honest, immediate, heart-engaging. Please, my friend, you really ought to launch a blog. (Like you really need another hassle.)
Well, Wooten got it 100% Right. Us people that don’t want to tax ourselfs more deserve the tax money that the rich libruls in the Atlanta area make. It’s not our fault they are better schooled and make alot more money than we do. Me, I think we need to go back to the old county unit system to make sure the Atlanta libruls don’t start taking more of their money back and cause us to tax ourselfs more to pay for the things we want.
We need the good roads and the schools and other stuff that makes our life good out here in the country. But we sure don’t want to have to pay for all of it. So it’s OK to put our hand in some rich Atlanta librul’s pocket and let them pick up some of the tab. Far as we’re concerned, this is one case where Socialism’s good. We can take from the rich people in Atlanta that pay alot of taxes and keep more of what we make ourselfs. That way we can keep guvmint small. But Socialism don’t work in any other case.
So I say if you’ve got them down then stomp them some more. I love to read about how people in the Atlanta area vote to tax theirselfs more to get what they want. That just means I get more of what I want too without having to pay for it. The state will see to it Atlanta libruls don’t get to keep all the tax money they pay. That means my taxes stay low and they pay three times as much. Serves them right.
Thank you Eleanor for the information on Fulton County’s patrols. So, back to my original point, why are residents in north Fulton County paying the same tax rate as someone who lives in another part of Fulton County who have sheriff department patrols? Seems like your typical taxation without representation to me.
Kamchak: I know you libtards get upset when someone trashes your party of moonbats in Washington (extreme hypocritical ones at that), but it is not Bush’s fault that every time Dems open their forked tongue mouths the stock market falls. Since the Nanny and cohorts took over Congress in 2007, the Dow has dropped by HALF. Since the election last November alone when the bad news that Obama won, the Dow has dropped 22%.
Now you can call that cowboys and indians playing like some mindless snotty nosed whining five year old, but I call it a serious amount of lost money under a Democrat congress’s watch and more recently, a Democrat president’s watch. The evil rich in this nation so reviled by the loonbat left have lost half their wealth. I’d like to know how the neo-Marxist Dem party is going to tax just them for their Utopian socialist causes. And congratulations on your long pants, but perhaps they are on too loose – either that, or the fat went from your belly to your head when you decided to vote Democrat with the rest of the children.
“And it may take a year or two to determine whether the American South can bounce back as the region of new dreams and endeavors. Scanning voter statistics from the last election, one would have to conclude the South of 2009 is in about the same position as it was in 1929: running short on leaders and long on dopes.”
Funny. I still continue to see northeastern liberals moving down here in droves from their former socialist liberal run (and taxed to hell) areas like New Jersey; I still continue to see Detroitans them move down here to find automobile and manufacturing jobs that disappeared in Michigan; I still see Californians move here where the Democrat-run state (and don’t give me that Arnold runs the state BS – state congress makes the laws, rules, and regulations) have taxed that state to hell and back so hard people can hardly afford to live there and corporations and LLCs are leaving like a stampede of buffalo. Now what was your point again?
“Unless Obama’s scenario for the future changes dramatically, the South is not going to play much of a role in the reinvigoration of a nation.”
See above.
“Few Southerners and almost no Georgians have been tapped for leadership roles in the Obama administration. That is hardly surprising. Obama drew relatively few votes from Georgia and other Old Confederate states. America may have shown it was ready for a black president. The South, and especially Georgia, demonstrated it was not ready for a Barack Obama.”
That is the most ridiculous, but not unsurprising, comment that is so typical of libtards from the Dimocrat party. Is the South rejecting Michael Steele? Did the South reject Colin Powell under Bush I? Did the South reject Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas under Bush II? The answer is no, no, no and NO! People with mentalities like that still stuck on stupid circa-1960s stigma of the South are the ones behind the times. Maybe – and I’m going way out on a limb to say this – but maybe some can’t comprehend that Southerners are CONSERVATIVE by nature and have major, MAJOR problems voting for a liberal Democrat. Further, over the course of the last 20 years or so, why are many if not most of the racist news stories coming out of areas other than the South? Here, see this most recent example from NEW YAWK:
03/03/09 06:48 AM
Falls police say woman put up racist sign
NIAGARA FALLS—Two days after a man was sentenced to probation and community service for putting up a sign as a “joke” in a public works garage that said “whites only” on a drinking fountain, city police were called to a home in the 600 block of 25th Street on Sunday to investigate another racially charged sign.
This one was clearly no joke.
No charges were filed Sunday, but police told the woman she must take down the handwritten sign on a fence on her property saying, “I rent three bedrooms [at her address to] white people Niagara Falls.”
The 53-year-old woman told police she put up the sign after someone tried to break into her house and added, “I can do what I want. I live in America,” according to a police report.
Police said they received complaints and she must take the sign down. An officer at the scene said the woman agreed to take down the sign under protest. The officer said the woman already had seven more signs she was planning to hang up.
Finally, Mr. Shipp, we Southerners will not stand for anyone from other parts of this nation already destroyed by unions and uber-tax policies by liberal Democrats coming down here to destroy our part of the nation, like pushing for unionizing all those Japanese, Korean, and European car manufacturer plants that did not go to New Jersey, Michigan, or California. Is that pretty clear enough?
Rural Georgians are nothing more than parastic welfare queens sucking money out of Atlantans pockets. Wooten will turn his usual right-wing rhetoric on it’s head to excuse the confiscation of wealth be backwoods Georgia because they are mostly bible-thumping ill-educated conservatives.
It’s great that Wooten proves yet again that conservatives have no principals or values that don’t bend when convenient. Way is excuse the massive welfare for your fellow travelers.
I seriously think that Bill Shipp needs not ponder other people’s tingling danglings. He’s a most considered correspondent, with many better things to think about. For heaven’s sake, man!
Well what do you know. Washington D.C. has a local AIDS/HIV pandemic. Maybe The Nanny was right after all in her wishes to use some of the stimulus bill for condom buying.
By Jose Antonio Vargas and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 15, 2009; A01
“At least 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a “generalized and severe” epidemic, according to a report scheduled to be released by health officials tomorrow.”
“That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 — or 15,120 — according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District’s HIV/AIDS office.”
“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”
“We have every mode of transmission” — men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use — “going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them,” Hader said.
“In addition to the epidemiology report, the city is also releasing a study on heterosexual behavior tomorrow. That report, funded by the CDC, was conducted by the George Washington University School of Health and Health Services.”
“Among its findings: Almost half of those who had connections to the parts of the city with the highest AIDS prevalence and poverty rates said they had overlapping sexual partners within the past 12 months, three in five said they were aware of their own HIV status, and three in 10 said they had used a condom the last time they had sex.”
Then again, we have to keep things in perspective: this is the same pseudo-commonwealth that has those liberal left wing pipe dream gun ban laws, yet still has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. To put that into perspective, DC had 46.4 murders per 100,000 people in 2007; right across the river in Arlington, it was 2.1 per 100,000. Good work liberals!
Regarding gun control, someone here mentioned that Georgia’s leaders are idiots. To many effects, I agree, especially when I see my state income tax go down the toilet and them having the audacity to even THINK of me paying even more. Anyway, every now and then they do something right. One such case in point was reported right here on the AJC regarding DC’s gun laws:
By BOB KEEFE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Washington — An economic meltdown, global warming, two wars and a new administration may be important stuff, but for Georgia’s congressional delegation, so is the right to have a gun.
Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson on Wednesday co-sponsored legislation that would give residents of the District of Columbia the right to possess handguns for the first time in more than 30 years.
The Washington, D.C., city council outlawed pistols, automatic weapons and high-capacity semiautomatic firearms in 1976 as a way to stem the city’s soaring gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban last year, but the city council is looking at ways to rewrite its local laws to keep restrictions on such guns.
Isakson and Chambliss’ legislation is attached to a bill that would give the district its first voting seat in the House. The Senate passed the voting bill Tuesday.
The right to have a pistol in Washington is simply a basic constitutional right, Chambliss said.
“Only a government that does not trust its citizens would refuse them the right to bear arms,” Chambliss said in a statement. “The right of Americans in every part of the country to own guns, whether for sport or protection, is clearly defined in the Constitution and must not be compromised.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Broun, an Athens Republican, announced Wednesday he was teaming up with Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) to establish a Second Amendment Task Force. The task force is necessary to “educate elected officials and the public on the necessity of the Second Amendment to maintaining our freedom and liberty,” Broun said in a statement.
Broun’s Washington office is known for the stuffed animals he bagged on safaris.
“Since Wooten’s opinion is that tax money should be spread equally across Georgia, wouldn’t his essay be more appropriate if titled “Share the Wealth”?”
Ah yes, a typical mindless libtard at heart. Hate your fellow Americans because of what they believe, or more pertinent, WHERE they live, liberal left wing cave dweller.
BTW: There is a lot of rural poor white rednecks (I figured I’d save you the insult, pompous libtard) that votes Democrat. They sure keep sending Robert Byrd back to Washington from West Virginia.
My God, that’s distressing news from D.C. How horrible. All the work and money we’ve poured into Africa and the Caribbean, and here the thing rears its head in our own nation’s capital.
“How much has the BMW plant cost South Carolina and what has the state of South Carolina get for their money? More important how much has KIA cost Georgia and will we ever get our money back?”
Oh I see how you libtards play. So, the fact that jobs are brought to these states is irrelevant. You must poor-mouth and lambaste them. Now you tell me, how much money was taken out of your paycheck last year for that Kia plant? Do you know? Do you care to fact find or do you just care to bucket lip everything that happens for the better that didn’t happen in your beloved northeastern or north midwestern socialist Utopia?
I’ll tell you this much, ace: It cost taxpayers a HELL of a lot less than the money we won’t be getting back from US auto manufacturer and bank bailouts under Obama.
Back to guns, well, here’s one way Obama and the Nannycrats in Congress are helping parts of the economy: gun and ammunition sales – and you can take to the bank this hardware isn’t made in China. And this story is just from Oklahoma:
By KELLY BOSTIAN World Outdoors Writer
Published: 3/13/2009 3:28 AM
Last Modified: 3/13/2009 12:59 PM
“Four months after the election of President Barack Obama, firearms and ammunition sales in Tulsa remain at a fever pitch.”
“Popular self-protection ammunition is often sold out at local stores, weapons are flying off shelves and the state reports an 87 percent increase in concealed carry permit applications for February 2009 over February 2008.”
“People are hoarding. They’re creating a shortage,” Jim Prall at Sports World on 41st Street said of ammunition sales. “We’ve sold more ammunition in the last three months than we sold last year.”
“Gun sales spiked in November with the election of Barack Obama and Democrats adding to their majority in Congress. But local gun dealers say the spike is turning into a steady climb with political worries about gun rights as well as worries about the economy and potential for increased crime.”
“Prall said his store planned ahead for the increase, having seen a similar spike
after Bill Clinton was elected, but the previous jump in sales pales in comparison to what’s happening now.”
Here, Mr. Shipp, I did some fact finding for you on the Kia plant:
“Kia certainly found plenty of incentives in west Georgia. When the company announced plans for its auto plant in early 2006, it came after intense courting from state and local officials, who offered the company tax breaks and other incentives totaling more than $400 million.”
Now maybe you can explain to the rest of us how tax breaks come out of your pocket. Oh wait, we already know that you libtards on the left think that federal income tax breaks are stolen from the poor and “working class” and merely given to those evil rich.
This HIV/AIDs ourbreak in DC is a goddam national scandal. It calls for immediate action by the Commander-in-Chief. I swear to God, when in doubt do what TR would do: send in the Marines. The President immediately should appoint a Colonel of the Corps as Surgeon General and instruct that person to crack whatever heads necessary to address the DC problem as first priority. Later, that person could take on advocacy of Stem Cell research, or whatever, as necessary.
“…coming down here to destroy our part of the nation…”
The war of northern aggression ended a century and a half ago, yet you still see carpetbaggers behind every tree. Is this the source of the digital, reactionary model through which you view the world? Do you enjoy the victimhood that is reinforced every day by Rush, Sean, Neil, Bill O, and little Billy K? You must, as evidenced in your delight in wallowing in it with every word you type.
What will THEY (the bad guys) do to YOU (the good guy)next?
“As a dog returns to its’ own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”
Glenn: it’s rather amazing how the tune of the libtards in this nation changes when Democrats are in charge, no?
Kamhack: what’s a day without one of you pathetic liberal moonbats mentioning that what I say is taken from Rush/Hannity/Boortz/>insert neocon hater radio host here<. I thought you libtards said we right wingers were now irrelevant anyway. What happened? Idiot.
Now on to other news and back to hypocrisy of libtards, I’m sure everyone remembers the DNC mainstream media having a heyday over the Cheney F-bomb on a live mic. Well, it appears that Hair Plugs had a moment himself. Good luck watching the same DNC media have a heyday over this F-bomb:
Oh, That Joe! (No. 48 in a Series) — Gimme a Break
March 13, 2009 5:40 PM
At an event at Union Station today where Vice President Joe Biden was heralding the $1.3 billion in investments in rebuilding train stations and passenger rails, a microphone picked up one of the former senator’s myriad Senate colleagues addressing him, formally, as “Mr. Vice President.”
That met with Vice President Biden’s standard reply.
“Gimme a f*&$#ing break,” he said, apparently unaware that the microphone was on.
And to Kamhack again: “The war of northern aggression ended a century and a half ago, yet you still see carpetbaggers behind every tree.”
Tell you what. You libtards stop bashing the South as if we still own slaves, and I’ll stop thinking of it as a separate region from the northeast, midwest, and west (which it IS the last time I looked at a map anyway).
Uh oh. What’s the Algore Global Warming priest going to do now? Oh wait, its now “Climate Change”. So, things being that cyclone/hurricane activity and energy is at a 30 year low (remember all the scaremongering from the Algore disciple moonbats after Katrina?). From an FSU study:
“Global and Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity [still] lowest in 30-years”
“Tropical cyclone (TC) activity worldwide has completely and utterly collapsed during the past 2 to 3 years with TC energy levels sinking to levels not seen since the late 1970s. As previously reported here and here at Climate Audit, and chronicled at my Florida State Global Hurricane Update page, both Northern Hemisphere and overall Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s. Even more astounding, when the Southern Hemisphere hurricane data is analyzed to create a global value, we see that Global Hurricane Energy has sunk to 30-year lows, at the least.”
Quick! We’ve got another crisis on our hands that needs US taxpayer dollars ASAP! It’s global cooling again just like it was when Jimmy Carter was about to start planning on running for president!
Another Ice Age?
Monday, Jun. 24, 1974
Time Magazine
“In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.”
“As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”
The “O” in it is that famous Obama “O” symbol in red, white, & blue. I gave the woman a big thumbs up and a wave – and yes, I was driving a much nicer car than her.
Remember, one of the Obama voters said this about her mortgage:
I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage…”
Minister beaten after clashing with Muslims on his TV show
By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 12:37 PM on 15th March 2009
A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’
The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu.
Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: ‘He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door.
He started slapping my face and punching my neck. He was trying to smash my head on the steering wheel.
Then he grabbed my cross and pulled it off and it fell on the floor. He was swearing. The other two men came from the car and took my laptop and Bible.’
CNN just reported that the piece of space debris that almost took out the space station was actually an Iraqi Shoe. The man should get three years for this. Who are those guys? and who needs star wars? Is this like the low spark of high heeled boys? That Iraqi loafer just wanted to pump (slap) you up! That’s right Hanz. Ya. I cant end this riff. Somebody stop me.
The US Business Council reported a study that said that if the US were in a 100-yard dash, we would be 23 yards behind. Our health care system does not provide the benefits for what is required to sustain it.
Chris mathew’s tinkle down his leg: The basis of our contract law, especially for artists, contain the vestiges of the one sided legal abominations that formed the pound of flesh we exacted from each and every party of the first part during slavery. That’s why you have a better chance at getting knifed by the cast of Different Strokes or Full House than by a terrorists.
How about Cheney still taking pot shots about the imminent threat of another 911 without him being our defacto commander in chief? Cheney is a dangerous man. He’s actually goading the prospect of a WMD strike on US soil and then by conceding it, can set up partisan claims of a Democratic bungle on Defensive Posturing.
It really is a shame that Obama let Osama get away in 2002 in Afghanistan when we had him.
“I would never “bash the south” as I was born on Peachtree St.”
Well Kamcheck, maybe you need to keep your fellow libtards in check then. Just an observation.
PoFo: “it really is a shame that Obama let Osama get away in 2002 in Afghanistan when we had him.”
You never disappoint in dullard off the wall colorful libtardism. BTW: exactly what in the HELL has your ilk in Congress – especially those Democrats that have been in charge of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2007 – been doing about Osama searching? How come we haven’t heard your beloved Nannycrats mouth off lately about not getting Osama not being found? How come we haven’t heard Obama talk about Osama?
Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
* Sudan offered up the terrorist and data on his network. The then-president and his advisors didn’t respond.
By MANSOOR IJAZ
LA Times
December 5, 2001
President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.
From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger and Sudan’s president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Iran’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.
As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster.
Realizing the growing problem with Bin Laden, Bashir sent key intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996.
The Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to “baby-sit” him–monitoring all his activities and associates.
But Saudi officials didn’t want their home-grown terrorist back where he might plot to overthrow them.
In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.
Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden’s personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.
Some of these men are now among the FBI’s 22 most-wanted terrorists.
The two men who allegedly piloted the planes into the twin towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader who managed Salim’s bank accounts and whose assets are frozen.
Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.
But U.S. authorities repeatedly turned the data away, first in February 1996; then again that August, when at my suggestion Sudan’s religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, wrote directly to Clinton; then again in April 1997, when I persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data; and finally in February 1998, when Sudan’s intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.
Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan’s data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they’d get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries–ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.
And that was not the end of it. In July 2000–three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen–I brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with Bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from one of the United States’ closest Arab allies–an ally whose name I am not free to divulge–approached me with the proposal after telling me he was fed up with the antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials.
The offer, which would have brought Bin Laden to the Arab country as the first step of an extradition process that would eventually deliver him to the U.S., required only that Clinton make a state visit there to personally request Bin Laden’s extradition. But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family–Clintonian diplomacy at its best.
Clinton’s failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger’s assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chairman of a New York-based investment company.
“How about Cheney still taking pot shots about the imminent threat of another 911 without him being our defacto commander in chief? Cheney is a dangerous man. He’s actually goading the prospect of a WMD strike on US soil”
He is warning us of taking the eye off the ball. Besides, exactly how different is that from your ilk like Dick Durbin and other Democrats who were hell bent in 2004-2007 or so in bad mouthing the Iraq war effort and sacrifice of our troops to the point of Osama bin Laden himself using their talking points?
“Our health care system does not provide the benefits for what is required to sustain it.”
Well, 86% of this nation has a health care plan and for the most part, nobody is dying in the streets. I can’t wait for universal health care where I wait in a government line behind someone who has no life with a stubbed toe while I sit there bleeding from a pork butt knife cut all because said someone has the same access I do. Oh yeah, and good luck libtard socialists when you can’t sue a government employee in your “Free” health care for all for incompetence. Can’t wait!
Now moving on to more insanity of libtardism….
The mainstream DNC lib media in print has recently gotten one nostril out of the sand. They have discovered that they don’t give enough Conservative points and are actually producing more views from the alleged right. The AJC is only the latest example (and I’m not talking about Wooten or his replacement). But pertinent to this point, it’s the Washington Post’s token alleged neocon, Kathleen Parker. You have to remember that to a liberal, anyone to the right of them is a neocon, even if they are a centrist “Conservative” at best. So, my expectations for a newspaper to simply report the facts – rather than hide the truth or at best extrapolate the half truths – shows that I’m too ignorant to understand said newspapers’ perspective. Got it Kathleen. Thanks.
By Kathleen Parker
Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page A17
BOSTON — The biggest challenge facing America’s struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.
Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right.
Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh’s “drive-by media,” are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.
There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.
But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, the chorus of media bashing from certain quarters has succeeded in convincing many Americans that they don’t need newspapers. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently found that fewer than half of Americans — 43 percent — say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community “a lot.” Only 33 percent say they would miss the local paper if it were no longer available.
Hey Glenn, you can use any of my wordings. I don’t take much time in phrases when dealing with the libtard left. I just fire from the hip, so to speak. “Nannycrats” just kinda popped out there. It really is what it is thought, isn’t it? Sometimes I crack myself up – all at libtard expense of course. (PS: I’m not “Andy”).
Dusty: I’m about fed up with libtards treating the South as if we were still in the 1950s. Besides, it doesn’t take much brain muscle to expose the indefinite idiocy of liberalism.
And now, there is more for Sunday follies. Why is it only when Democrats run Washington that the communists feel they have to flex their muscle and be belligerent?
Report: Cuba, Venezuela could host Russian bombers
By DAVID NOWAK, Asssociated Press Writer David Nowak, Asssociated Press Writer – Sat Mar 14, 3:38 pm ET
MOSCOW – A Russian air force chief said Saturday that the country could base some strategic bombers in Cuba or on an island offered by Venezuela, the Interfax news agency reported, but a Kremlin official quickly said the military had been speaking only hypothetically.
The U.S. and Russia have been trying to reset their relationship, severely strained over U.S. plans to position missile defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic and by Russia’s invasion of U.S. ally Georgia last year.
Well thank you, Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg, for your “Nannycrats”, a term I shall immediately flourish with abandon. It seems that I should have been using it, lo, these past thirty years. I seem to have been destined since the mid-’70s to piss on the shoes of those who would control other people’s children, and “Nannycrats” so aptly describes those wearing the shoes.
It’s interesting, what you say about shooting from the hip as you blog. I suppose that’s the best form for blogging, but I do wonder how lethal you must be when you actually bother to compose.
I’m reading Fred Kaplan’s new book on Lincoln, the subtitle of which is, “A Biography of a Writer”. It’s what I was taught to think of Lincoln: Genus Stylist. Kaplan argues really well that words — honest, fitting, accessible words — meant everything to Lincoln, so much so that they willed him into being. Into being better. Always better.
Lincoln was great guns for better, ever better, and the betterment of everyone.
Three elderly English clubmen in their cups took the last train home. Passing their compartment, the Cockney conductor announced, “Wembley! Next stop: Wembley Station!”
The first gentleman, lifting his drooling chin from his waistcoat, asked, “Wembley?”
The second replied, “No, Thursd’y.”
Said the third, “So am I…so let’s get off and (urp)…have a drink!”
“You’ll be rich if you can patent what you are smoking..”
Ah, well Mr. “Shipp,” I must say that I admire you for at least saying SOMETHING in retort. That’s better than most libtards I deal with who usually just retort with “you are angry and full of hate.” Thanks for being one step above a cockroach.
I see you are in your teachery coaching mood today. I am not impolite. I asked most politely WHY IS BILL SHIPP, a professional liberal journalist, wasting time on a conservative blog of little importance??? I consider all blogs to be of little importance but fun occasionally.
NO, I am not a candidate for Jim’s job. I wouldn’t want to make those AJC decider editors laugh. They might want to send me to California. See, I did not say… where all the nuts and naughty go. That would be impolite but appallingly honest.
ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2009) — Are Americans flunking science? A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive® reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test. …
According to the national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences:
* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
Yet the majority of these people are “smart” enough to know that Obama is the greatest thing to happen to this nation. Ever.
Wooten is a complete fraud. Previous posts that he’s made say that Buckhead and North Fulton should secede from their counterparts because they pay more in taxes than most in the City of Atlanta and South Fulton. He’s a cherry-picker at best, and a two-faced liar at worst.
I thought this is about dirt? I consider myself a moderate and agree with many of Wooten’s opinions, but I am not on board with this one. Living in N. Fulton we are paying the highest property taxes in the state because we pay like 15% of our property tax to Grady Hospital which is used by about everybody that has no insurance. How much is that county in south Ga paying towards Calhoun Memorial? I doubt anybody in the state gets reemed as much as N. Fulton taxpayers. Without the metro Atlanta economic engine this state would be broke and state legislators should be helping out a little more than they do.
“WASHINGTON (AP) – The Obama administration is abandoning one of President George W. Bush’s key phrases in the war on terrorism: enemy combatant. In court filings Friday, the Justice Department said it will no longer use the term to justify holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.”
Oh I see. More liberal euphamisms. No, wait, let’s just let everyone in Gitmo go free. They’re all innocent civilians from Cheney’s holocaustic made up war. So how many “detainees” released from Gitmo to return to the battle front against the West does this make?
Officials: New Taliban chief was once at Gitmo
Operation officer was released to the Afghan government in 2007
updated 9:20 p.m. ET, Tues., March. 10, 2009
WASHINGTON – The Taliban’s new top operations officer in southern Afghanistan had been a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the latest example of a freed detainee who took a militant leadership role and a potential complication for the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison.
U.S. authorities handed over the detainee to the Afghan government, which in turn released him, according to Pentagon and CIA officials.
Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, formerly Guantanamo prisoner No. 008, was among 13 Afghan prisoners released to the Afghan government in December 2007. Rasoul is now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a nom de guerre that Pentagon and intelligence officials say is used by a Taliban leader who is in charge of operations against U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan.
“Living in N. Fulton we are paying the highest property taxes in the state because we pay like 15% of our property tax to Grady Hospital which is used by about everybody that has no insurance…I doubt anybody in the state gets reemed as much as N. Fulton taxpayers.”
sl3: did you miss my post on 3/14 at 11:02am here on said topic? I agree with your post wholeheartedly, by the by. But you need to tread carefully on what you post. Stuck on stupid 1960s liberals here will read in between your lines and call you a racist if you trash talk your tax dollars going to Grady.
Don’t look now, but a California bred moonbat is about to be released . Don’t you just love liberal euphemisms such as “counter culture” to describe domestic TERRORISTS?
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – A saga that began in the violent cauldron of California’s 1970s radical counterculture and took a dramatic turn into a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Minnesota is about to come to an end.
Sara Jane Olson, who was a fugitive for a quarter-century after attempting to kill Los Angeles police officers and participating in a deadly bank robbery near Sacramento as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, is scheduled to be released from a California prison next week.
One bomb, packed with nails, failed to explode as Hall and his partner drove away from a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Division on an August night. A similar unexploded device was found under another police car miles away.
“That bomb should have gone off that night,” Hall said. “I would have been just one of many people that would have been dead. It just brings up a lot of anger knowing that she’s going to be released.”
Hall recalls that a girl about 8 years old was watching from the restaurant.
“That little girl was waving at us as we drove off. If that bomb would have gone off, she would have been killed along with her family,” said Hall, who served 31 years with the department. “I haven’t forgiven her (Olson) in the least for what she’s done and what she could have done to many more innocent people.”
Dusty…I realize you’re pretty simply minded! However to think that Bill Shipp is actually blogging here at Wootens corner is really going beyond the pale……
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Mr WordPress
January 23rd, 2009
2:17 pm
Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.
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Will
March 9th, 2009
11:51 am
Today’s Lesson Regarding Government Subsidized Private Schools.
“School vouchers save public schools money”. Really?
Let’s use Senator Johnson’s estimate of about 5% of public school parents using his government funded subsidy to enroll in a private school and let’s use a typical elementary school with about 600 students. Finally let’s use his $5,000 per child estimate of government funding moving from public to private schools.
If 5% of 600 students leave our example public school, that means around 30 students will take about $150,000 from public school funding. Oh, but you say, look at the savings the public school will reap. What savings? Thirty students represent less than one fewer student per clasroom in our example school – no reduction in teacher personnel at this school nor any reduction in costs associated with teachers.
Will these 30 students leaving reduce the operational cost of this school? I don’t think it will cost any less to heat and cool the building, do you? How about maintaining and cleaning the building? Me either.
If 60% of these 30 students are transported to and from school, will these 18 fewer students result in a reduction in the number of buses needed or the cost to operate the buses?
Exactly where will the school system savings come from to offset the loss of $150,000 funding? When I posed this question to my state representative, she said that 30 students was the equivalent of two teachers. That would ONLY be true if ALL 30 STUDENTS that chose to move to a private school somehow happened to be from the same grade level and, in the unlikely event of this happening, this would reduce the teacher allotment of our example school by only one teacher. My state representative said she had not thought of that but she supported school vouchers anyway because “that’s want the voters want”.
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Dusty
March 9th, 2009
11:55 am
Well, Jim, you sound very wise as usual. I cannot get excited over someone else filling in for you part of each week. This will always be YOUR blog.
But, as always, the suggestion is that CHANGE is good. I’m not so sure about that. Sometimes maybe. Sometimes not. I look at Washington and wonder. That does not put me in the mood for any more change at the moment.
Enjoy your time off, Jim, but don’t stay too long on the farm. You might turn into a real redneck and we don’t need that here. The present one is more than enough.
Congrats on the new format. Conservatives will be holding forth day and night so we will have lotsa good sense spread around. I’m for that!!
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Ed
March 9th, 2009
12:14 pm
“The radicals stay radical; the conseratives stay conservative.”
Did you catch Jim subtly trying to brainwash you into believing conservatives can’t also be radicals. Nice try Jim; have a nice retirement but soon.
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Buford T. Pusser
March 9th, 2009
12:19 pm
If I can hitch a ride on a C-5 to South Korea, I’ll walk north and end this little saber rattling problem.
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Marti Hernandez Rojas
March 9th, 2009
12:22 pm
When your hairline recedes that much, it’s time to find a new way to comb it. Please.
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Polemic Foreshadowed
March 9th, 2009
12:23 pm
Can’t wait for the first Chris Broe post. The second … well … I could wait a loooong time for that.
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Ga Values
March 9th, 2009
12:28 pm
I’d like to start off your new blog with a simple question. Why don’t we cut the salary of congress and make them get their own health care insurance. They are surely not earning what we are paying them and a little dose of the real world rather than being treated like royaltiy would be good for them.
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Churchill's MOM
March 9th, 2009
12:31 pm
I spent Friday at my sister’s house playing bridge with her club. The main topic of conversation was how much the Masters is off this year. The current going rate for a badge is only $1,500. If you have always wanted to go this could be the lowest cost trip in many years.
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Just Nasty & Mean
March 9th, 2009
12:44 pm
G’mornin Jim, et al,
I cannot say I am happy about this change in any way, other than happy if this is what *you* want.
I cannot imagine how someone is going to pick up this mantel and be able to carry on the width and breadth of what you do. There are lots of potential writers who can research a given subject and formulate a position. What has distinguished you over the years is that conservative thought comes from your soul–from the core. I would be willing to bet that you rarely research a position, but may look up some detailed statistics. I suggest your positions on topics, both political and other–comes to you naturally and without much mental machination of what your position is. It is already— there!
How do you find that capability? How do you qualify for “it”? How do you prove you have “it”?
I hope we hear from you frequently. Enjoy fishing, golfing, or whatever it is you do when you don’t do this.
Take care.
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Retire Already
March 9th, 2009
12:45 pm
Wooten, your dated and backward thinking is the biggest reason why the GOP will be in the minority for years. Now you’re the typical white haired codger who has nothing better to do than sit around and complain about everything. Your opinion is stale and irrelevant. Sure, go ahead and preach theory that died with Eisenhower, but where were you while Bush was presiding over the core of all this mess? All of the vaunted conservative jargon went out the window.
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AmVet
March 9th, 2009
12:49 pm
SSDD.
A new and improved format with the same old tired yellow journalism.
No wonder the non-partisan (LOL!), non-conservative conservatives keep getting annihilated every other November.
And all the html in the world isn’t gonna change that anytime soon…
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Ed
March 9th, 2009
12:58 pm
“The radicals stay radical; the conseratives stay conservative.”
Another subtle form of brainwashing by Jim is when he juxtaposes the word “radical” next to word “conservative”. Typically liberals and conservatives are at the opposite ends of political philsophy, so he’s subtly having you belive all liberals are radicals, which is not true. “Fixed News” uses a lot of those techniques.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 9th, 2009
1:10 pm
Bank of America is investigating how Merrill Lynch accounted for
wayward trades in the final, frantic months of 2008 — and why at least
one $120 million trading loss was slow to appear on Merrill’s books,
The New York Times reported.
Of particular concern are the activities of a Merrill currency trader
in London, Alexis Stenfors, whose trading has come under scrutiny by
British regulators, The Times said, citing people briefed on the
investigation. The loss Mr. Stenfors is believed to have incurred so
alarmed Bank of America, which acquired Merrill early this year, that
this week the bank examined the books of other traders who were on
vacation.
In a statement Friday, Merrill said it had uncovered an “irregularity”
during a review of its trading operations and is working with
authorities to investigate further.
“Senior managers of the business are focused on the issue and believe
the risks surrounding possible losses are under control,” Merrill said.
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BS Aplenty
March 9th, 2009
1:11 pm
Best wishes on the pending career transition, Jim. I hope the new conservative standard-bearer will perform as ably as you.
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Ga Values
March 9th, 2009
1:13 pm
Retire Already 12:45 pm
Eisenhower was a Conservative , Jim along with his buddies Saxby & Johnny the Socialist are Republicans
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Redneck Convert
March 9th, 2009
2:18 pm
Well, don’t think I didn’t catch that snide remark, Sister Dusty. It wasn’t very Christian of you.
It’s real bad news this new Conservative writter could be a lawyer. We already got one of them here. Raghead is always the first in the a.m. and his first one is longer than anything Wooten writes. If the AJC is going to hire a lawyer to do the writting, better get the thing set up to handle a book. Then you can wait till the p.m. to get any posts from the readers.
Wait–a real bad thought just come to me. The new Conservative writter could be Raghead hisself. We’ll know if his first rant is about the Capital Gains Tax and Dr. Sowell.
Anyhow, I guess I wish Wooten a happy retirement. He was never Conservative enough for me but he was about the best one out of a real sorry bunch there at the AJC. Have a good day everybody.
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AmVet
March 9th, 2009
2:20 pm
So let’s see here.
The faithful contend that Rush is NOT the leader and that any talk otherwise is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit the hemorrhaging GOP.
Yet…of ALL of the people listed, he is number two.
Things that make you go hmmmmmm…
More than two-thirds of all Republicans feel their party has no clear leader, according to a national survey by Rasmussen Reports. That compares to just 10 percent of Democrats who say their party is leaderless.
The survey comes in the context of Democrats’ efforts to portray talk-host Rush Limbaugh as the party’s head man.
Other results from the Rasmussen survey of 1,000 adults:
Just 5 percent think presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the party’s leader. RNC Chairman Michael Steele also wins 5 percent. About 2 percent of Republicans say talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh is the GOP’s top dog. That compares to 7 percent of Democrats who see him in that role.
Sarah Palin shows up in the survey, but only 1 percent identify her as the party’s leader, however.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner are tied in the leadership department. For each, one half of 1 percent selected either McConnell or Boehner as the leader of the GOP.
Overall, 68 percent of Republicans say the GOP currently has no clear leader.
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Jackie
March 9th, 2009
2:29 pm
@Jim Wooten,
You and I are on very sides of the political equation, but, I can offer you the best of wishes with your retirement and further extend a hand to one of my fellow Viet-Nam vets. CONGRATS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, let us pose the question regarding the economy and the approach the Repubs have taken. Being obstructionist has not and will not work. Even some of their own constituents are suffering dreadfully.
Have you noticed that none of the Repubs have offered an alternative to the plan currently proposed except to say that we are spending too much and spending is not stimulative.
Can someone PLEASE help those folks out with definitions and rational thought process. They say if we spend too much today, we will pay for with out childrens and grandchildrens taxes. My reply to that, if we do not have jobs to pay for food, housing and clothing, what children are they talking about?
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Recreational flatuence
March 9th, 2009
2:44 pm
I am not in favor of any of these attempts at the Gold Dome to “increase revenues,” i.e. raise taxes. What those jacklegs need to do is cut spending, like all the rest of us are doing. Now, please.
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Recreational flatuence
March 9th, 2009
2:46 pm
Sarah Palin leads the GOP in hot sexiness.
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Dusty
March 9th, 2009
3:45 pm
Dear redNeck convert,
I made no “snide” remark about you. I was perfectly honest which is the Christian way of doing things. I did not want Jim to get out in the hot sun too long while he’s at the farm. He might think HE drives a beer truck.
No undercover stuff for me like you-kno-who writes all the time. But you are good for a laugh. ‘Tis true and I say that little lie quite honestly.
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Mac
March 9th, 2009
3:45 pm
Why hasn’t Monkey Boy already posted 731 times?
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Mike
March 9th, 2009
3:48 pm
To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if there’s a rule, there’s been a problem.
They don’t chain up the leather jackets at Dillard’s to protect the inventory from the honest people.
Maybe the elderly who see requiring photo IDs as an affront to their honesty should request that banks not check ID when people come in bearing checks written on their accounts.
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Glenn
March 9th, 2009
5:15 pm
I really like the new format, Jim! Very legible and intuitive.
Would any of you care to speculate as to President Obama’s motive for snubbing Gordon Brown repeatedly during the British Prime Minister’s recent state visit? London is furious. Obama refused to host a state dinner for our great ally, and while the PM presented the President with a proper gift of state, a statue of Churchill, the President in turn gave the Queen’s First Minister 25 DVDs of old movies, including “The Wizard of Oz” and “Psycho”. Instead of dispatching a special envoy to London to apologize, Obama’s State Department issued a statement to the effect that Great Britain is of no greater importance to the U.S. than is any other member of the United Nations.
I’ve never heard of anything like it.
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RGB
March 9th, 2009
5:32 pm
Why did Obama snub Brown? Simple–his experience as a community agitator didn’t prepare him for the job. Whether handling the niceties of hosting our most important ally or dealing with the stumbling economy, Obama is not up to the job. Obama was given a pen made from the wood of the HMS Resolute–the same ship from which Obama’s desk was built. And Obama gives PM Brown DVDs that won’t even play in the U.K. Obama really demonstrated his cultural awareness and sensitivity, didn’t he?
Didn’t Obama tell us that he would smooth things over with our friends and foes alike? That he possesses a special understanding of how to deal with people of all cultures (because he lived in Kenya for a while)? Obama has treated Syria with more respect than either Great Britain or Israel–which is not a surprise to many of us.
Americans are paying a terrible price simply to prove that we are “fair-minded” people. The Dow dropped 80 more points today. Peoples’ retirements are in jeopardy. And folks are getting rightfully angry.
Any Obama supporters sorry you voted for the man? Or do you hate Republicans more than you love freedom and capitalism?
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@@
March 9th, 2009
5:44 pm
….and open late too, Jim?
Kewl.
Glenn:
I read an article about Obama’s snubbing of the brits. Let’s see if I can remember all the excuses offered……
Inexperienced staff.
Obama’s fatigue.
Obama’s having difficulty juggling his “many” balls.
Obama’s having to make decisions too fast.
Obama’s responsibilities are interfering with his family time.
He needs a smoke.
My assessment? He’s in over his head and drowning.
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@@
March 9th, 2009
5:45 pm
Oops!
……in self-pity.
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@@
March 9th, 2009
6:22 pm
“Missappearing” and reappearing posts, too.
Is this a stubborn wrinkle that the AJC just can’t iron out, Jim?
Causes me to get a little steamed, it does.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 9th, 2009
6:42 pm
Dear Glenn @ 5:15, I suspect The Empty Suit is unaware that he insulted a former ally. Change we can believe in. As to the new look on the blog, I have reservations – I perceive there are no cookies and I will have to actually learn how to spell “Ragnar Danneskjöld.”
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 9th, 2009
6:43 pm
I err, to my great relief – there is a cookie.
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dave
March 9th, 2009
7:02 pm
Retire Already – your buddy Barney is at the core of this mess, I guess you missed that somehow?
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hryder
March 9th, 2009
9:55 pm
Do not talk the walk unless you are willing to walk the walk.
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Get Real
March 9th, 2009
10:19 pm
“Those who don’t live by the laws they impose should be gon.” Is that true Wooten? Well you can substitute priciples for laws, and that would explain the republicans very well. That want to preach (not those republicans)about being fiscally prudent while running up a massive debt for 6 years (democrats ran Congress for two years).
The druggie Limbaugh wing of your party is delusional Wooten. The man has been president for 45 days and you’re already hoping he fails. Now thats patriotism. If he indeed does, which Raghead, Musty Dusty, and @@-hole so desperately want, there isn’t anyone in the republican party to lead the country back. Funny how in 8 years, you couldn’t find one fault of George Bush, but have been one of the harshest critics of Obama a mere 45 days in. Even George Will, David Brooks, and other at least gave him a chance, your retirement can’t come soon enough Wooten.
P.S.- I had to write late to beat Raghead’s thesis paper first thing in the morning. He might as well be Wooten, he agrees with him on everything. Just like a little brother follows big brother around.
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Gerald West
March 10th, 2009
5:39 am
Much ado about nothing! There is no evidence of extensive voter fraud in Georgia. Those who advocate burdening the poor and the elderly with unneeded rules and laws do so for the pleasure of inconveniencing the poor and elderly, not for solving an election problem.
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Peanut Man
March 10th, 2009
5:52 am
**What does SXABY have to hide????**
Chambliss lawyers to fight subpoena
The Associated Press
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Attorneys for U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss are heading to court in Savannah to fight a subpoena by an attorney suing Imperial Sugar.
Chatham County Superior Court Judge Herman W. Coolidge is scheduled to hear arguments from attorneys Tuesday.
Savannah lawyer Mark Tate wants to question Chambliss about whether company executives asked the senator to help it avoid blame in the February 2007 explosion at its Georgia refinery in Port Wentworth.
Senate lawyers argue Chambliss is immune from submitting to a deposition under the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution, which shields members of Congress from testifying about legislative business in lawsuits.
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Churchill's MOM
March 10th, 2009
6:03 am
Sara is my leader
Sixty-eight percent of Republican voters say their party has no clear leader, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey released Monday. Another 17 percent are undecided.
Just 5 percent view either Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential candidate, or new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele as the party’s leader. Two percent see conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh in that role, and 1 percent name McCain’s former running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio are each seen as the GOP leader by less than one-half of 1 percent.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 10th, 2009
6:37 am
Good morning all. Many elements worthy of discussion:
(1) One is stricken that laws putting people into jail require only a majority vote, but changes to ethics rule, to allow sanction for misbehavior, require a 2/3s vote. Suggests that our overlords need special privileges.
(2) One is stricken by the unrecorded vote on the rules change. Mr. Cagle’s decision – to mask the vote – allows plausible deniability to those rascals who seek to circumvent scrutiny of their affairs.
(3) I don’t think I know Mr. Brown, but there is an element of disingenuity in his speech, as described by our genial host. The crowd reaction sounds more like rubber-neckers gawking at a car wreck rather than specific honor to brilliant oratory.
(4) Surely there are some republicans who failed to pay their taxes also? I would hope that we are not talking about instances of disputed amounts – the usual and legitimate tax disputes over “what is income” – but rather that we are talking about willful non-filers? I have represented many in good faith tax disputes, and I hope the legislature was not magnifying the genius of the bureaucrats who mistakenly misinterpret the statutes from time to time.
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Mac
March 10th, 2009
6:38 am
So, what, did he have a stroke?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 10th, 2009
6:39 am
For benefit of friend Redneck, my curiously related morning rant, on the bill before Congress today:
As our Congress debates the home owner bailout bill today, Dr. Sowell asks the simple question, “why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?” Our leftist overlords have determined that taxpayers are obliged to help those having trouble paying mortgages up to $725,000.
Dr. Sowell also asks, “Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand– for the very good reason that he could not afford it– why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?” Leftists have a long tradition of being compassionate with other people’s money, so the new debt taxpayers are taking on, for benefit of the friends of Nancy, is unsurprising.
One begins to wonder, “what is beyond the pale?” Is there no non-defense spending so stupid that leftists will not support it? When Americans voted for “change” last November, they were not voting for higher taxpayer subsidies of the indolent. Americans did not hold as a high priority “destruction of the greatest health care system in the world.” (Ok, there are a few Obamaniacs who would travel to Cuba or Canada to get a heart transplant, except they would die while on the waiting list.)
Quite the opposite, the change most often cited by our leftist friends during the campaign was a desire to get away from “deficits” and “earmarks.” Almost sounds like a sick joke now, does it not, given the bill in debate before Congress today? Of course, most people who lament deficits or earmarks have no idea of the magnitude of evil arising from various economics terms.
“Earmarks” are opprobrium, not because of the adverse economic effect of the spending, but because they are a circumvention of the legislative process. An earmark is nothing more than spending inserted at a last legislative minute by one who is politically connected, to ensure the nature of the spending is not thoughtfully considered by his fellow legislators. It is the Congressional equivalent of a teen yelling as he goes out the door, “I’m going out and I took $20 from your wallet, Dad.”
“Budget Deficits” (like the similarly vacuous “trade deficits”) are a nearly-meaningless accounting construct, merely the measure of the difference between revenues and disbursements. As Congress has a poor track record in estimating both, biased to understate the “deficit,” our indignation at the imbalance has a weak and constantly changing foundation. While deficits of volition, i.e., deficits not required in response to any national emergency, have soared under President Obama, the deficit itself – any deficit – is not particularly a problem. Deficits do have consequences over the long term, in that the accumulation of debt results in rising interest rates. On balance, however, higher interest rates are less damaging to the overall economy than a tax increase for the same amount.
“Non-defense spending” is the great unspoken evil of government. This spending is a measure of the amounts that overlords appropriate from the citizenry, not to protect the citizenry, but rather to spend on the arbitrary and uneconomic preferences of the overlords. It is an excellent proxy for “erosion of freedom” and “thievery at the highest levels.” If one really wishes to calculate the evil done by the overlords, one need not look further than this single concept, both the total level and the annual change. It is time for us to change our focus – change that can do an informed voter some good.
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Mac
March 10th, 2009
6:40 am
Mmmm. I love that new blog smell.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 10th, 2009
6:42 am
Dear Mac @ 6:38, my long-distance diagnosis is that Mr. Brown has a gluten allergy.
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DowntownGuy
March 10th, 2009
7:32 am
Jim, I’d love to hear your comments on state republicans working to bring back sales taxes on GROCERIES! Are you kidding me? They can’t pass a law to allow counties to voluntarily decide via referendum whether or not they want Sunday retail liquor sales, and then they pitch this mess at us?! Any bum that votes for the return of state taxes on groceries should be thrown out of the state legislature without a second thought.
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James
March 10th, 2009
7:34 am
As a fiscal conservative, I can’t see that either major political party “gets it”.
With the democrats, you get what you see. Tax and spenders for social gain and improvement.
With the republicans, I really believe what you get is what you can’t see.
Let’s take earmarks for example. This is where I am just about ready to throw in the towel with this bunch of republicans. Most republican members of Congress voted for President Bush’s eight budgets, all of which increased spending and the nation’s debt. All of which had wasteful earmarks. Then they lost big time in November.
Now they pledge that they won’t keep making those mistakes. So what do they do? They insert billions of dollars of earmarks in President Obama’s first budget and THEN TURNAROUND AND CRITIZE THE PRESIDENT FOR WASTEFUL SPENDING!! They rail against him (rightfully so) for going back on his promise to rail in the practice of earmarking but cede the high ground of this arguement by earmarking!
Both sides rail against the wasteful salaries and corporate jets of big business but continue to earmark. This is where neither side “gets it”. Its not necessarily the money in earmarks and salaries, it’s the symbolism that both represent.
I can’t support the democrats and their wasteful spending but I sure can’t support the republicans and their wasteful spending and their failure to realize that continuing to do and act as they have for the last eight years is no plan to regain the majority.
If there were congressional elections this year, I would probably sit out the election. I just don’t see a viable option when it comes to federal spending.
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Ga Values
March 10th, 2009
7:44 am
40% of the earmarks in the budget bill are for Republicans. Both of our Socialist Senators woved AGAINST stripping out the earmarks. Saxby said he would make a difference in congress, sure for the LOBBYIST that pay him.
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Kaveman
March 10th, 2009
7:58 am
Republicans don’t cut taxes on average individuals, just on corporations and the unearned income of the elite. Republicans RAISE taxes on middle class working people. Look at the taxes they are raising: property taxes on people’s homes and sales taxes on groceries. Anyone who votes republican because they “cut taxes” is officially a friggin’ moron.
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Peanut Man
March 10th, 2009
7:59 am
How much money did Saxby Chambliss take from Peanut Corporation of America? What did they get for their money?
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fed up
March 10th, 2009
8:05 am
To stay on topic here, anyone in a legislative role who continually doesn’t pay their taxes should be ousted. Bottom line, doesn’t matter what party they’re in or what color their skin is.
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David Brooks
March 10th, 2009
8:08 am
The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems, but let’s face it, the current Republican response is totally misguided. The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate.
The G.O.P. leaders have adopted a posture that allows the Democrats to make all the proposals while all the Republicans can say is “no.” They’ve apparently decided that it’s easier to repeat the familiar talking points than actually think through a response to the extraordinary crisis at hand.
If the Republicans wanted to do the country some good, they’d embrace an entirely different approach.
First, they’d take the current economic crisis more seriously than the Democrats. The Obama budget projects that the recession will be mild this year and the economy will come surging back in 2010. Democrats apparently think that dealing with the crisis is a part-time job, which leaves the afternoons free to work on long-range plans to reform education, health care, energy and a dozen smaller things. Democrats are counting on a quick recovery to help pay for these long-term projects.
Republicans could point out that this crisis is not just an opportunity to do other things. It’s a bloomin’ emergency. Robert Barro of Harvard estimates that there is a 30 percent chance of a depression. Warren Buffett says economic activity “has fallen off a cliff” and is not coming back soon.
Stock market declines are destroying $23 trillion in wealth, according to Lawrence Lindsey. Auto production is down by two-thirds since 2005. In China, 20 million migrant laborers have lost their jobs. Investment in developing countries has dropped from $929 billion in 2007 to $165 billion this year. Pension systems are fragile. Household balance sheets are still a wreck.
Republicans could argue that it’s Nero-esque for Democrats to be plotting extensive renovations when the house is on fire. They could point out that history will judge this president harshly if he’s off chasing distant visions while the markets see a void where his banking policy should be.
Second, Republicans could admit that they don’t know what the future holds, and they’re not going to try to make long-range plans based on assumptions that will be obsolete by summer. Unlike the Democrats, they’re not for making trillions of dollars in long-term spending commitments until they know where things stand.
Instead, they’re going to focus obsessively on restoring equilibrium first, and they’re going to understand that there is a sharp distinction between crisis policy-making and noncrisis policy-making. In times like these, you’d do things you would never do normally. When it’s over, we can go back to our regularly scheduled debates.
Third, Republicans could offer the public a realistic appraisal of the health of capitalism. Global capitalism is an innovative force, they could argue, but we have been reminded of its shortcomings. When exogenous forces like the rise of China and a flood of easy money hit the global marketplace, they can throw the entire system of out of whack, leading to a cascade of imbalances: higher debt, a grossly enlarged financial sector and unsustainable bubbles.
If the free market party doesn’t offer the public an honest appraisal of capitalism’s weaknesses, the public will never trust it to address them. Power will inevitably slide over to those who believe this crisis is a repudiation of global capitalism as a whole.
Fourth, Republicans could get out in front of this crisis for once. That would mean being out front with ideas to support the wealth-creating parts of the economy rather than merely propping up the fading parts. That would mean supporting President Obama’s plan for global stimulus coordination, because right now most of the world is free-riding off our expenditures. That would mean eliminating all this populist talk about letting Citigroup fail, because a cascade of insolvency would inevitably lead to full-scale nationalization. It would mean coming up with a bold banking plan, rather than just whining about whatever the Democrats have on offer.
Finally, Republicans could make it clear that that the emergency has to be followed by an era of balance. This crisis was fueled by financial decadence, and public debt could be 80 percent of G.D.P. by the time it’s over. Republicans should be the party of restoring fiscal balance — whatever it takes — not trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
If Republicans were to treat this like a genuine emergency, with initiative-grabbing approaches, they may not get their plans enacted, but voters would at least give them another look. Do I expect them to shift course in this manner? Not really.
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Peter
March 10th, 2009
8:29 am
Sarah Palin…….. Billing the taxpayers for her kids to travel to official events the children weren’t even invited to? She finally agreed to pay back the state for that money she took.
Her per diem charges to the state in the amount of $17,000 while she was living at home instead of in the governor’s mansion? She has now agreed to pay the taxes owed on that money. Another tawdry grab at a few dollars that didn’t belong to her.
Yes Jim….Here is the Republican Party at it’s best !
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Chris Broe
March 10th, 2009
8:36 am
Did anyone get how funny Wooten’s column is today? Truth is the best humor. It just is. Now Wooten has me wondering if there’s one democrat in the country who pays his taxes.
There is no question who deserves to write professionally for the ajc, if that person is among the contributors to this forgettable freelance fish wrap. There is a soul who hoses every journalist here, and who snaps a towel at every troll. There is a writer who continually clotheslines the laundered flail of wind-chimes who wonk here. There is a writer: The Writer.
Jklol
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Big Buckd GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:44 am
A few words deep in President Obama’s budget proposal have the fast
money crowd up in arms: “Tax carried interest as ordinary income.”
With those words, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his latest DealBook
column, the administration is seeking to close one of the biggest tax
loopholes on Wall Street — one nobody seemed to notice in good times,
when everyone was minting money.
Private equity and hedge fund types defend the favorable tax treatment
they have been getting on most of their income, and they’ve fought hard
to keep the status quo.
The idea is back on the table, however, and the tax switch would affect
others as well, including venture capital firms, real estate investment
firms and oil and gas investors — anyone who operates a partnership.
The venture capital community has already gone to Capitol Hill seeking
an exemption, arguing they are crucial to America’s entrepreneurial
spirit.
But in a show of a bit of competition between parts of the financial
industry, private equity wants to make sure venture capital gets taxed
if it is going to be taxed.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:45 am
Citi is paying about $13 million to compensate employees
who had been expected to go on various trips that were later canceled,
Reuters reported. The payouts include $3.5 million in gift cards for
top Smith Barney brokers, The New York Post said.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:46 am
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York and Barney Frank of the House
Financial Services Committee on Monday sent a letter to Bank of America
seeking information on bonuses paid out to its employees and those of
Merrill Lynch.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:47 am
Merrill Lynch offered millions in guaranteed bonuses to lure ten Latin
American investment bankers away from UBS last spring, giving one,
Alexandre Bettamio at least $7 million,
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:47 am
Warren E. Buffett said on Monday the U.S. economy had “fallen off a
cliff” but would eventually recover, although a rebound could kindle
inflation worse than that experienced in the late 1970s.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:48 am
The New York Times Company said it raised $225 million through a
sale-leaseback deal with W. P. Carey & Company, an investment firm, for
part of The Times’s headquarters building.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
8:49 am
At least 25 investors in Bernard Madoff’s failed business are asking to
speak at a Thursday hearing at which Mr. Madoff is expected to plead
guilty,
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Dusty
March 10th, 2009
8:54 am
Well, all the usual Democrats got up grouchy this morning. Sen. Brown must have gotten up grouchy that morning in the Gold Dome. And if one more person cuts’n'paste a long article, I’m going to get as grouchy as Sen. Brown. THE SUBJECT, folks. THE SUBJECT of today’s blog. ETHICS!!
I agree with Jim Wooten:”Those who don’t live by the laws they impose should be gone.” Absolutely! Even Democrats!!
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Mrs. RepubLady
March 10th, 2009
9:18 am
Dusty, you TRAITOROUS WITCH! You forgot to say, “Except REPUBLICANS!” We worked TOO hard for TOO long, and have come TOO far for you to back down now on the “law applies to everyone equally” argument. What were you thinking? Do you want them to start prosecuting our Beloved former leaders like Bush and Cheney for taking their rightful exemptions? I’m so angry with you right now I could… I could…. OH, SPIT!
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 10th, 2009
9:21 am
I will soothe your spirit Mrs. Repub. David Brooks @ 8:08 opens with a half truth, one that undermines the remainder of his argument. “The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems..” A fully-honest statement would have read, “The Democratic response to the economic crisis has no redeeming value.”
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Chris Broe
March 10th, 2009
9:51 am
Over at Bookman’s woman2woman blog, Jay shares the simplicity of his pun palette: “Why do they call him steel? He should be called aluminum. He folded that fast.” Now, that doesn’t even make sense. Aluminum is as strong as steel and cant be folded. Aluminum FOIL, however…….The line should have been, if the author had any writing talent whatsoever, “Why do they call him steel? He was so easily foiled, he should be called aluminum. ………..he folded over so fast………..his credibility crumpled under the grilling…….from the big tent republican…….basted….reflective…..there’s a million of them..
But as it appeared, only the most blog-simple among us would have wasted a piece on that pun. Go wrap yourself, Bookman, you tin-man journalist. (I’ll let the trolls over there run with this)
Jklol
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Dusty
March 10th, 2009
9:55 am
Dear Mrs RepubLady aka LIBERAL LUCY,
Please return to your padded cell immediately! You have confused President Bush and V.Pres. Cheney with the loquacious losers of NON-TAX PAYERS who now run Washington.
If, by any slim chance, you paid your taxes the last few years please send your resume pronto to Mr. Geithner, our TAX CHIEF. He needs all the help he can get. It is no secret that he FORGETS to pay his taxes now and then. You might be of some help. But I doubt it.
All Democrats have very short memories regarding their own activities. As Ragnar suggested…. more or less…. “Democratic response….has no redeeming value.” So true!
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Chris Broe
March 10th, 2009
9:58 am
Ragnar, I never knew editing like that was possible. No really, when one reads your rewrites, with the added authority and tone, and wonderful array of meanings only you can glean from the reams of words in your repertoire, what can one say, but, “JBMLAW!”
jklol
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Dusty
March 10th, 2009
10:04 am
Dear Chris Broe PoFo,
So Bookman ran you off and now you are crybaby cooing over here. Go outside! The birds are singing like crazy. They are soloing with the squirrels at the bird feeder. Get going! You need some sunshine!
Me too. I’m gone for awhile.
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Glenn
March 10th, 2009
10:32 am
Ragnar, I liked your first post, especially your points (1) and (2). Mr. Cagle is quite the operator, isn’t he? He seems to specialize in defending the indefensible.
It reminds me of Ms. Pelosi running interference for the earmarks. Before Truth, always protect the members who elected you to Leadership, rather than the voters who elected you and them in the first place.
By the way, President Obama’s education speech this morning, to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, sounded like something Aaron Sorkin would write, only devoid of ideas and specifics. He did endorse merit pay for good teachers, however, and called upon the states to develop more agressive programs to root out “bad teachers” who fail repeatedly to measure up to *federal* expectations. That should be a hard sell viz the NEA, of course, unless a deal had been cut during the election.
All in all, he spent the speech couching his obvious goal to federalize education in terms of “cooperation” with the states, calling upon them repeatedly to enact his objectives, all of which can only conduce to nationalization.
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Silverchief
March 10th, 2009
10:39 am
The head of the Department of Revenue for the State is on the list of the non tax payers……….Fire them all !!!!!
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 10th, 2009
10:59 am
Dear Glenn, probably really @ 11:32 as the blog seems to remain on standard time, I think you are on target re: Mr. Cagle. Nobody has to go on the record in a manner that could embarrass later. That sort of thing could lead to cynicism.
Dear PoFo @ various times, you are in good form today, consistently entertaining, my compliments.
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Peter
March 10th, 2009
11:14 am
Hey Dusty……..
.”I agree with Jim Wooten:”Those who don’t live by the laws they impose should be gone.” Absolutely! Even Democrats!!”
How about Sarah Palin the tax evader herself…should she be gone ?
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Jackie
March 10th, 2009
11:44 am
The Repubs, were they not so destructive, would be a joke.
They have worked on their “political double-speak” with the apparent outcome being they have much more work to do. Only a few of the truly devoted and those lacking the will and/or ability to understand what is being said versus what is being done still tolerate them.
The Repubs have brought pain and misery and they want to stand back and obstruct those who are trying to clean up their mess. Classic example of “throwing the rock and hiding their hands.”
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Chris Broe
March 10th, 2009
11:57 am
You should watch Kudlow spitting on himself over the short covering today on the earnings reports. This guy is great. He’s always spinning bull. Cnbc.
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Chris Broe
March 10th, 2009
12:02 pm
The ashes of conservatism appear here regularly. Republicans have already wasted weeks of retorts on blaming Obama for Bush. They may as well say, “Why couldn’t the Chosen One, the Messiah Obama have stopped us from being ourselves for the past eight years? Where was he? Why didn’t he vote against the war? Okay bad example…..
The conservatives have nothing. Not a thing.
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Curious
March 10th, 2009
12:46 pm
Is that a GOLF TAN or a spray-on tan?
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AmVet
March 10th, 2009
12:48 pm
Dr. Broe @ 12:02,
Any rational, reasonable American would think that with less than 21 months until the next election, the Republiconned would not be wasting a single moment trying to stem their ever-worsening hemorrhaging.
Yet…
Electoral Bloodbath, Part Trois. Coming to an election everywhere next year.
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fed up
March 10th, 2009
12:56 pm
Peter the difference between Palin and the people mentioned in this article (if what you said in your first post is true) “She has now agreed to pay the taxes owed on that money.” I don’t think they’ve paid and in some cases will even admit they owe, although there are liens against some of them.
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Steve
March 10th, 2009
1:02 pm
Gerald,
I assure you I have no desire to inconvenience the poor & elderly. I do see a need to verify who a person is prior to their being able to vote. Look at the number of users registered by Acorn72, and the thousands that have now been verified to be bogus. That in itself indicates we need a law/rule to verify the person who shows up at to pole is the registered person they claim to be.
Perhaps you are against such a law, because you are not eligible to vote.
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Peter
March 10th, 2009
1:32 pm
Hey Fed up……… I find that “special”…….. she tried to rip off Taxpayers and got caught……Gee all those Vacations and money spent on her family…..
HA HA HA……. Funny stuff from your Republican LEADER ! No wonder the party is basically leader less !
Apparently the rules do not appear for big mouth Rush as well…..
Remember he said…..if you get caught doing drugs …….you should do the TIME !
Of course he got caught, and did ZERO TIME…..!
Republican’s and their lies…… all part of “Republican Family Values” !
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Dusty
March 10th, 2009
1:45 pm
Dear Peter,
How exciting!! In the next big election, Sarah Palin can choose her job. She can be either President or Treasury Secretary . Palin knows how real people live, is experienced in governing and can make a good speech without a teleprompter. She is also THRIFTY! A winner!
But if she declines the presidential job, she can be Secretary of the Treasury. All you need for that is an excusable forgot-taxes mistake and you’ve got it made. Look at Sec. Geithner. Forgot his taxes but got forgiveness. Obama said anybody can make a little mistake. Voters look at Obama and say “That is true!”
So you and Churchill’s Mommy keep us posted on Palin news. She is very interesting and we all like to hear about her. A star on the rise! So much more capable than the Dem duds now running Washington.
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fed up
March 10th, 2009
2:02 pm
From what I read the rules were changed in midstream on Palin…bottom line she paid up. Can you debate anything without name calling, Peter? Seems that almost everyone on this blog and Bookman’s that lean to the left make it their mission to viciously attack anyone that doesn’t wholeheartedly agree with them. Pathetic.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 10th, 2009
2:14 pm
for you rookies looking at the market & getting ready to jump in, 2 words.. BEAR TRAP…
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Peter
March 10th, 2009
2:37 pm
HA HA HA………Fed up and Dusty……
“Rules changed mid stream ” ? HA HA HA……. Yes taking her kids on events they were not invited too, and charging tax payers for their trip……working more days from home then in the office…..and then charging taxpayers to do so….?
Yes I imagine there was a “change in the tax code” ! OPS…… you mean she got caught !
Fed up……You know for certain she sent in the check ? We do know she acknowledged she is wrong !
Yes a star on the rise Dusty……. is that from the helicopter she uses to kill wild animals ?
Apparently you don’t have to be smart to be a Republican…..heck a Republican can just look across the sea, and call one’s self internationally savvy !
Perfect leadership for the Republican party ! She and Big Mouth Rush are really leading the way !
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fed up
March 10th, 2009
2:41 pm
You’re calling someone a big mouth, Peter. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Don’t go away mad, just go away.
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SOUTHERN ATL
March 10th, 2009
2:48 pm
I am confused as to why Georgia’s Senators would request $209,000 to study ways to improve BLUEBERRY production. The media has swamped the nation daily concerning the problems that occurred with the PEANUT butter plant. This is very embarassing for the state of Georgia!!! Why not study/research ways to make the prodution of PEANUT butter safe?????
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Chris Broe
March 10th, 2009
3:56 pm
Probably skidded along the bottom enough. Kudlow’s head is about to explode. He’s actually been spitting all day. If he’s not the head of the republican party, he’s certainly the horn of the bull.
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Road Scholar
March 10th, 2009
4:09 pm
Wait a minute. 2/3rd’s majority was needed to approve. The vote was 32 for and 16 against. No wonder our legislature is less than competent. 32/(32+16)=.666667 or 2/3rd”s I know it was just a hand vote, but….
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Peter
March 10th, 2009
4:31 pm
Goooooooooooo Fed up…..
Sarah Palin can evade Taxes and she is GREAT !
Sarah Palin can Look across the Ocean, and consider herself International !
Sarah Palin can shoot animals from a Helicopter, and she is a kind person !
Sarah Palin is a True Republican LEADER !
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Dusty
March 10th, 2009
4:42 pm
Err Chris Broe,
What’s wrong with Kudlow? Nothing. In fact, he sounds good. Anybody that might run against the doddering Dem Chris Dodd is wonderful. Besides that, Kudlow opposes estate taxes. I can’t see taking the money saved for your children on which you paid taxes and then the government takes it when you are gone.
Kudlow, I never knew you but keep your hat in the ring.
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david wayne osedach
March 10th, 2009
5:10 pm
You will note that our legislators get their pay raises no matter how bad the recession. I would like to see them (at least offer) to take pay cuts like eveyone else.
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fed up
March 10th, 2009
5:55 pm
Or better yet lay them off (permanently)
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Craig Spinks /Evans
March 10th, 2009
10:47 pm
Politicos, bureaucrats and all other adults who reside in our state should be subject to the same local, state and federal laws. Politicos help make our laws while bureaucrats help enforce them. But neither group should stand above our laws.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
7:32 am
Good morning all. One of our fellow bloggers last week quoted noted ditherer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s chestnut about “consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.” Thus, as Obama is so much smarter than the rest of us, we should not expect any sort of intellectual activity that we would describe as ‘rational” – The Empty Suit is well beyond that stage.
We do not accuse the One Whom We Have Awaited of lying in his promise to abate earmarks – such an allegation would be base in discussing The Holy One. Surely all can see that this year is last year, and next year will not be this year. Even friend PoFo could not have phrased it so brilliantly. And always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom.
Stimulus after stimulus, all funding government at ever-higher levels, and constricting the productive economy ever more, may be having an effect. I think I heard the stock market is now at its highest level ever. And unemployment has plunged to the lowest recorded levels in history.
The only thing generally wrong with the Obama signing statement is that it is not April 1. Rush need not hope any longer – it is a fait accompli.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
7:33 am
In addition to the AJC, I read an obscure alternative paper each morning, The Wall Street Journal. The top essays in that paper today are “causation of the housing bubble” and “treatment for the collapse in value of mortgage securities.” Rational policymaking requires understanding what specifically went wrong with former policy.
As to the “bubble,” Alan Greenspan argues that the Fed’s admittedly “easy” money policy 2001-2007 had no significant role in the housing bubble. To the “cure,” Warren Buffet advocates suspension of the regulator use of “mark to market.” We examine separately.
Chairman Greenspan’s argument, reduced to its simplest element, is that the Fed’s management of the short-term Fed funds rate was irrelevant to the decoupled longer term securities rates that funded mortgages. Lest we dismiss that as a hyper-technical and self-serving analysis, there is historical truth for his distinction.
The US had comparatively unprecedented inverted yield curves in 2005, i.e., long-term rates were actually lower than short-term rates. That is peculiar, as investors almost always require a premium for locking up their funds for a longer period.
To put the argument at a personal level, if an investor has a choice between a 4% cd for 24 months, or a 3.5% cd for 10 years, a normal investor will almost always choose the former, as there is no premium for accepting the longer-term risk. The market was otherwise in 2005, and this was after a long period of effective parity.
It is inconceivable for the Fed to conduct an “easy money” policy that would bring long-term rates lower than short-term. With an inverted curve, the market is forecasting deflation, seemingly irreconcilable with “easy money.” The only plausible explanation I ever heard for the phenomenon was that Chinese investors were looking for long-term investments to hide funds from their government. I am embarrassed to be reduced to a conspiratorial xenophobic argument, but I have no other.
Much of that long-term funding wound up in the US mortgage-backed securities market, as that was (historically) the most stable long-term securitized private investment. Chairman Greenspan’s argument is unsatisfying – we all prefer to blame a faceless demon for distress beyond our control – but it has a ring of truth. The Fed may be innocent.
Far happier is that Warren Buffet has embraced one of my two September 2008 resolutions to the seized-up financial markets. Last year we suggested that all would end happily if the government would do nothing more than (1) guarantee inter-bank obligations, and (2) suspend the “mark to market” rule.
Faithful students of the economy recall that, instead of the jbmlaw plan, the Bush administration teamed with Congressional Democrats to conduct a wild spending spree (“TARP”), alas only partially effective. TARP is now succeeded by the Obama administration’s even wilder spending sprees (“Stimulus” and “Continuing Budget Resolution,”) doomed to be even less effective as they are untargeted. Today’s news carries a note that Speaker Pelosi suggests there is need for another “stimulus” program. What do you call someone who keeps doing the same thing hoping for a different result?
“Mark to market” is one of those eye-glazing accounting issues for people outside the industry. The rule says that bank books should reflect component assets at whatever price the market values them, without regard to the actual performance of the assets. In the case of mortgage securities, currently there is no market for those securities at any price – thus a value of zero – due to fears of undiscoverable subprime customers.
Broadly 95% of mortgages continue to perform as agreed, thus there is a disconnect between market value and income value of the securities. The lack of marketability is crucial to banks, as securities transactions are the primary method of liquidity management for banks. This lack of liquidity is one element that led to financial seizure in the credit markets. The common government-slang term for those unmarketable but performing securities is “toxic assets.”
Mr. Buffet’s extended conversation with CNBC Monday produced enough headlines (mostly over his condemnation of Obama administration policies) that his “mark to market” comments have been broadly overlooked. Nevertheless, Mr. Buffet apparently sees the same things as I, (a) that mindless regulatory enforcement of the accounting construct manufactures false failures in the financial industry, (b) with typical ripple effects beyond those failures. Good to see that Warren is almost as sharp as your humble correspondent.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
8:00 am
Gotta wonder what was earmarked for Georgia. Has the AJC reported on this? Because I’d entertain the thought of organizing an effort to attack any projects or programs earmarked for Georgia this year, perchance to kill the things in their cribs. Were such an effort successful, like-minded folks in other states could be challenged to follow suit.
Anybody know of a good, conservative communications firm?
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Chris Broe
March 11th, 2009
8:10 am
Rag, you type like Rose Mary Woods, man! Listen, Everyone! Rag is teasing the lurkers by making them think he can type 500 words in five seconds, like Napolean Dynamite.
That said he tries to make some salient points, and My mother thanx him, my father thanx him, my wife thanx him, (if she were still with us: now she belongs to the angels), and I thank him.
I met my wife at Hoolihan’s, and we danced for hours. In all of our 26 years of marriage, we never danced together again; we both hated dancing, we only danced when we met because we both just wanted to get laid. We were inseparable after that. I never met anyone with absolutely no respect for authority like my wife. She didn’t respect parents, teachers, police, politicians, God, her customers (art brokers), boyfriends, or anything or anybody. I thought I was a badass, but I was not worthy. We didn’t have a perfect marriage, (she didn’t respect husbands either – I was the 3rd).
Over the years, I estimate that my wife sold nearly 50 thousand paintings. We worked side by side, producing and marketing and paying taxes on the artwork. To pass the time, we’d riff comedy material and she wasn’t just an artistic genius, but a comedic upstart. Her line, “Volvo with a gun rack” made it all the way into Robin William’s act in his 2002 HBO special. I opened with that line for five years, from 1991 – 2001, and it NEVER failed to produce a really big laugh. (robin william’s didn’t get a laugh with it because he used it wrong). I truly was not worthy of her, and I married WAY over my head. She often expressed regret at having married me, but fortunately we had a child and she wouldn’t separate father and daughter.
The world is minus one artist. Deal with it.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 11th, 2009
8:35 am
Your boy Saxby is up to his ears in earmarks as usual, how about reporting on what he spent the money we are going to borrow from the Chineese.
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Bill Shipp
March 11th, 2009
8:37 am
House Speaker Glenn Richardson has just unveiled a new vision for Georgia that would surpass previous endeavors and might even make a little money.
Richardson would make Georgia the marriage capital of the nation almost overnight. Atlanta could become Las Vegas East, without quite as many home foreclosures but with a lot more churches.
We’ve been given only a peek at Romeo’s great cash project. Last week, in a rare appearance in the well of the House, Richardson delivered a rip-roaring argument for allowing the state’s constitutional officers to perform legal wedding ceremonies.
The marriage measure sailed to passage in the House with only one dissenting vote. Spoilsport Rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, cast the lone “nay.”
If the Senate signs off on the House action, Georgia will have more politician-parsons than any state east of the Ozarks. Just look at who would be given the legal right to hitch man and woman into legal matrimony: the current governor, the former governor, the lieutenant governor, House Speaker, House Speaker pro tem, Senate president pro tem, attorney general, secretary of state, state school superintendent, commissioners of labor, insurance and agriculture, and, of course, the state House clerk.
This new battalion of marryin’ folk could set up booths on every corner of every county seat. Georgians and out-of-state tourists could customize their marriage ceremonies to fit their personalities. One might tap Gov. Sonny Perdue for the honors, and the governor might throw in a bass-fishing trip as a free prize.
Not many people know that Georgia once hosted a thriving marriage mill industry. One such mill was located near Folkston to make it easy for Florida couples to sneak across the line and tie the knot. The other mill, at Ringgold, was located near the Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina state lines. That made the Georgia stop super-convenient for mountain couples with a sudden yen to get hitched.
Alas, Georgia’s blue noses crusaded against the mills, labeling them illegal, immoral and perhaps unconstitutional. Like the roadside clip joints and pet bears and possums, wedding centers vanished from the landscape. Not a word has been heard about them – until now.
One might think the General Assembly would be working overtime in this especially crucial session. But no, that is not the case. Between planning marriage chapels and selling bass tackle, Georgia lawmakers have had little to do but twiddle their thumbs and watch the mailbox, awaiting the arrival of government bailout money.
Of course, they could have occupied their time otherwise, with items such as:
► Fixing the state laws that allowed subprime loans and set off an unprecedented wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures.
► Investigating Georgia Power to determine why the company wants Georgia taxpayers to pay for a nuclear power plant seven years before it is built.
► Calling for a referendum on casino gambling in several border counties. (Just think of the new revenues that would generate.)
► Reorganizing Georgia’s state budget writers. Last year’s team missed Georgia’s total estimated income and appropriations by 37 percent.
► Creating a special ethics commission to oversee Gov. Perdue’s method of estimating the annual revenue. Any project with “ethics” in the title always makes the legislators look good, and they don’t have to work much to win praise.
We could think of a thousand other projects to keep state officials busy while they waited for the Obama bailout. When the bailout train finally does roll into the station, our lawmakers will have to get down to hard labor and forget wedding chapels for the moment. The lawmakers will need to work around the clock reorganizing Georgia’s budget so we can spend our way out of debt. For this crowd, that should be just as easy as a walk down the aisle.
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Redneck Convert
March 11th, 2009
8:39 am
Well, the price of Skoal went up again and what I want to know is who put that in this Obama budget? Anyhow, if earmarks was hogs we’d all need noseplugs just to walk outdoors. This budget is a disgrace, and it don’t even include the money to run a entrance ramp to GA 400 from Simpsons Trailer Park.
I see Raghead beat out Wooten again for most words. It beats me how he can read all the good Conservative writters in the papers and come out with something that looks like he spent all night on it when Wooten ain’t even put out the column yet. It’s pretty clear he’s cut out for the law. He probly can’t clear his throat without needing 3,000 words to do it.
I’m real sorry to learn this a.m. this Chris Broe lost his wife. I knowed she was sick but until today I didn’t know she died. I’ll get all the folk down at the Church of Holiness to put in a prayer for him. I know I’d have a hard time making it without the missus. Have a good day everybody.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
8:39 am
Dear PoFo @ 8:10/9:10, I know you do not wish sympathy, but we will all miss your muse. Congratulations on a great 26 years – many are never so blessed. I am grateful that your wife’s physical misery has ended, and you have our prayers/wishes for your own psychic recovery.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
8:48 am
Good morning Redneck @ 8:39, in my field we measure verbiage by dollars rather than by the numbers. I am an industrial-strength producer.
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RadianChalant
March 11th, 2009
8:54 am
The Conservatives complain about all of the spending from the Obama administration, yet the Conservatives are including tons of earmarks of their own. The budget is supposedly only 8% higher than the last federal budget. Hey people, the costs of everything is going up and up, so the budget has to go up also to even cover the same expenditures as in the previous year. Let President Obama work in peace, but let him not just accept every bill that shows up on his desk. The President will do fine; just give him some time.
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Chris Broe
March 11th, 2009
9:06 am
Rag’s point could be summed up in one sentence, “You cant make a silk parse out of a sow’s earmark”.
Rag’s problem in communication is a common one. He’s like a modern day Shubert, who used to worship Beethoven from afar, only catching fleeting glimpses of his hero across a town square, or down the street. Shubert wrote masterpiece after masterpiece during his life, and his symphonic range was astonishing. He died young, thinking himself unworthy. But he achieved everything that Beethoven achieved in music: A distant second to Mozart. Okay, rag isn’t like Shubert, I just like to tell that story.
The point about Rag is that he cannot understand the writing 101 class that I give freely everyday to one and all: Subject matter dictates tone. Tone dictates structure.
Now what does that mean? Subject matter in Rag’s first comment is Obama’s inherited economy, and he properly assumes the tone of the bitter sarcasms and the learned attitudes inherent in any partisan truth. But his structure doesn’t match the tone. What is structure? Structure is like the gravitational constraints on an architect who wants to design a weird modern building. He has to trust the math. He cant invent irrational numbers or assume that there is a final digit for Pi. Thus, Rag’s premise, that any new president is responsible for the status quo on inauguration day, wont support any poetically phrased prose. Lets take a closer look:
He opens with Emerson. New rule: Never quote Emerson. First, you’ll miss Emerson’s point, although you may come close. Second. Never riff on a genius. Never. I knew this one guy who though he could edit Mark Twain. I warned him. He scoffed. I think he’s dead.
I’m being cruel to be kind but I will illustrate my point with some history that I’ve recited many, many times over the years on this blog, and which Richard Belzer used in a tribute to Carlin last month. . Mark Twain said (and I quote), “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
PS. Forget the second comment from rag. To the extent that a lurker would wade into Rag’s second comment, after reading the first, is the extent to which they are an imbecile. Judge yourself today by that extent. You know the truth. You are applying this litmus test to yourself long after you waded into rag’s second comment.
One Paragraph. Moron.
Two Paragraphs. Mongoloid Idiot.
Three Paragraphs: Imbecile.
The whole thing: Rag himself has many aliases.
Jklol
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
9:30 am
PoFo,
I’m very sorry to read of your wife’s death. Your occasional references to her always were uniquely touching, and appreciative of her uniqueness. Please accept my sincere condolences, even though you don’t want to.
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Chris Broe
March 11th, 2009
9:33 am
and lets get another thing straight: I appreciate condolences. I don’t want them expressed because dusty, glenn, Andy, corporal, redneck, getalife and @@ will then impersonate me dissing the commiserations. You people are a total embarrassment. I cant imagine what the lurkers must think. But let them know now. That a new era is upon us. The unrefined grist that the AJC presents as candidature for the new conservative writer is a test to see if anyone understands the real application protocol: Whoever shall grasp the Pen from the Conservative Rosetta Stone is mightier than King Arthur and Excalibur!
That edit will be the winner.
Jklol
I know I have a tendency to swoop in and total obliterate a blog. I know the jealousies and bitterness that accompany the coveting of writing prowess. Just yesterday, I read the New York Times review of Jane Fonda’s return to Broadway, and I was jealous and bitter because I’ll never write like that. I barely understood it; I only understood it to the extent that I knew that I am unworthy. So, I emailed dusty’s and @@’s last 500 comments to this wonderful writer and just hope that they somehow clobbered him or her.
Jklol
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Rush Limbaugh for President
March 11th, 2009
9:40 am
Good morning all. I am glad to see Rag is on the job. His blinding brillance is exceeded only by his dearth of objectivity and carefully crafted intellectual dishonesty. He carefully left out that Buffet said that patriotic Republicans and Democrats should get behind the President. Buffet is for the mark to market rule to ensure a company’s balance sheet can be trusted. He is also for some easing of the regulatory side of it for banks to help lighten the reserve requirments. You either can’t hear or you totally misrepresented what he said.Buffet see nothing like you, he actually supports Obama.
By the way, the the ditherer’s chestnut is actually ” a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Key word being foolish. Words do matter.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
9:51 am
Dear Glenn @ various other times, your note at 8:00/9:00 was prescient. Drudge reports that Mark Sanford is formally rejecting portions of the “stimulus” monies. You and Mark are on the same wavelength.
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JLK
March 11th, 2009
9:56 am
Chris Broe, thanks for sharing that at 8:10! Delightful! I feel honored.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
9:56 am
What Ragnar protests, I think, is the Obamaphiles’ blatant play for “dehobgoblinization”, one of the late Mr. Buckley’s favorite coinages.
Incidentally, I never liked Emerson’s aphorisms. For me, he was a belletrist, best understood, as Chris Broe points out, in the context of his windy essays taken whole. He wrote at a stand-up desk, to discipline his tendency to wordiness. Still, it’s fascinating to see him attempt to streamline antebellum English — a project undertaken with greater success by Lincoln, Whitman, Melville and Emerson’s protoge, Thoreau. But for their many modernizations, even Twain later would have sounded like Poe.
In his first two paragraphs of the day, by the way, Ragnar reads distinctly like the actual Twain, whereas in his most recent post, Chris Broe sounds, unfortunately, more like me.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
9:59 am
Dear Prez @ 9:40/10:40, I make no pretense at objectivity, leaving that form of dishonesty to our leftists. But I respectfully believe I report correctly on the mark to market.
You are correct that Warren likes the “mark to market” for benefit of investors – surely we see the clamor for financial stocks now – but you dishonestly conceal his firm affirmation that regulators need to disregard “mark to market” for all regulatory decisions. As that element of financial stability is the sole reason for my advocacy of suspension of mark to market, Warren and I are closer in sync than you and he.
As to his “support” of Obama, I acknowledge he affirmed his support for Obama while eviscerating every policy so-far advocated by The Empty Suit. Support like that is reminiscent of Harry Reid’s advocacy for Bush policy is Iraq.
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Dusty
March 11th, 2009
10:04 am
Dear Chris Broe.
I don’t care what you say. You fantasize enough about your own words to take care of that. But I am sorry to learn that your wife has died. Must have been an exciting marriage. Hang in there! You are funny…sometimes…not to mention that you were more wordy than Ragnar today. We do excuse you for that …today only.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
10:23 am
*”Surely all can see that this year is last year, and next year will not be this year.”*
Ragnar,
That witty and winning line reminds me of the time the Speaker of the California Legislature, facing constitutional deadlines, pronounced an edict stating that, “for purposes of legislation, Tuesday shall be a Thursday”. We used to call it “tesseracting”.
Funny people, politicians. Except when they hook up with a Goebbels, a Beriya or a Chou En-Lai.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 11th, 2009
10:37 am
Dear Glenn @ various times, you have insight into some of the overlord personalities. Do you know anything about this “intelligence” guy Charles Freeman? He sounds like a real piece of work.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
11:14 am
I’m enamored of your final point, Mr. Wooten, that while families are belt-tightening until their heads turn blue, Washington is on a spending spree. At lunch yesterday in Gainesville I overheard an elderly gentleman speak with amazement of how impolitic this is, of how it just won’t play at the kitchen table.
I side with the Teamsters, though, on circumscribing Mexican trucking in the U.S. Mexican trucks should be contained within the break-bulk zones. The trucks are not maintained to our standards, and are a road hazard. We haven’t the resources to inspect them all, and Mexico hasn’t the will to do so.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
11:20 am
Ragnar,
I knew nothing of him until the recent stories appeared. Let me look into his background a little.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
11:44 am
Ragnar,
I just looked up the fellow’s resume. Nauseating. There’s a certain breed of polecat in the Fever Swamp that specializes in selling out the U.S. to hostile foreign interests. This guy Freeman definitely is of that low subspecies. My guess is that Feinstein objected to his lucrative flacking for China, while others on the Committee may have noted that as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia he seems to have done nothing to warn of the dangers of Wahabbi militancy orchestrated by the Kingdom.
I see that he has some choice words for Israel. Oy vey.
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Terry
March 11th, 2009
12:15 pm
It is indeed depressing to see how someone who is supposed to be “informed” and “objective” can ramrod this kind of nonsense to his readers. The bill passed today was to continue keeping the government running for the rest of FY-09. It is not the FY-10 budget, where we are promised more scrutiny against earmarks. Anyone with any sense can go to whitehouse.gov and read what the budget entails. If he did not sign it today, the government would have closed-down COB today. If your congresspersons or senators did not budgetize earmarks for Georgia, so be it. The less the better. Consider yourselves privileged. The author obviously has no knowledge of the federal budget process and is not informed.
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Glenn
March 11th, 2009
12:48 pm
The President had 50 days to insist on a porkless bill. He didn’t do it.
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Wooten is a Hack
March 11th, 2009
12:50 pm
Jim Wooten’s article looks like it took about 2 minutes to write. If he had bothered to mention the specific Republican earmarks it might have taken 4 minutes. He is getting paid for his pathetically simple minded school yard rants when most of the people on this blog can write circles around him.
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MacArthur O. Means
March 11th, 2009
12:57 pm
I live closer to Chattanooga than Atlanta and my wife thinks its stupid I watch WSB news in the morning instead of a closer station. The answer is simple, really – Karen Minton and Carol Sbarge. Delicious.
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fearless fosdick
March 11th, 2009
1:05 pm
Jim I hate to tell you this (not really!) but your opinions have become totally irrelevant. Outside of the Pompous Ragnar, Glenn, and the bobble headed one Dusty nobody bothers with you anymore. Witness your measley 27 posts against Bookman who has a morning post that had 105 responses, and an afternoon post where 164 people have opined. Why wait pull the plug now!
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Dusty
March 11th, 2009
1:40 pm
Dear Fearless Fosdick,
I see you are still a purely comic character without character. To compare Wooten’s blog to Bookman’s is like comparing filet mignon to sardines. You’ve got the sardines over at Bookman’s, lotsa them. The steak is here.
Please stay at Bookman’s. When we want to smell fishy, we will call you.
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David S
March 11th, 2009
2:38 pm
Rag is plain ignorant.
Without the presence of the Federal Reserve in the marketplace there would never have been the available money to create the stock market, dot com, real estate, or any other bubbles that we have faced since their creation. Certainly other players manipulated their investment products to entice the gullible, but once again, not one of those malinvestment opportunities would have been available in a market limited by sound money.
The true culprits were gathered together on that fateful night in November 1913 on Jekyl Island. The conspiracy to rob the american economy, sow the seeds of expansive and oppressive government (fueled by deficit spending), and empower the banking system once again to pull all of the levers of power was launched in that fateful Geogia location. Unfortunately those bankers and president Wilson are long gone so their treasonous crimes will go unpunished.
So long as we allow spin artists to deflect blame away from the true monster that is destroying this country and allow the blame to fall on groups acting in their own self-interest but deceived by the Fed’s manipulative market signals we will never come together to get rid of the Federal Reserve and restore sound money policies to this nation and this government. Without such monetary reform, we are all doomed to permanent enslavement to a system that is being run for the benefit of banks and the entrenched government, and not the american people.
A government forced to live within its means by the implicit restraints of a sound monetary system based on gold or other commodity would be in no position to afford these kind of earmarks or the ridiculous deficit spending that is robbing ours and the next dozen generations blind.
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David S
March 11th, 2009
2:45 pm
As for the earmarks, if the congress doesn’t decided where the money will be spent, then the president gets to decide where 100% of the budget money goes. Does that actually sound like a better situation – especially given this president?
When all of the businesses and individuals in your district paid $100 million in taxes, wouldn’t there be an expectation on their part that some of that would come back to them for local projects? Especially since a bunch of that money is from federal highway tax dollars?
The system is way messed up. The government shouldn’t take the money from us in the first place. Once they have taken it, it is the responsibility of my congressman to try and get it back for our district. Not the ideal situation, but until the taxation ends, that is the best way to keep the idiots in washinton from wasting it on “shovel ready” stupidity at the capitol.
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Wooten is a Hack
March 11th, 2009
2:52 pm
Dusty, Wooten is for the shallow, one dimentional, simple minded ideologs who masquerade as intellectuals. No one has all the answers so by pretending you do you show your emotion drives your thoughts and that your intellect does not guide your emotion.
Wooten is a mile wide and an inch deep. You fit in perfectly
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Shawny
March 11th, 2009
3:07 pm
Steny Hoyer puts out an op ed today on why earmarks aren’t that big of a deal. He says it is only 2% of the bill. Wouldn’t you like another 2% raise? If you could cut your entire personal spending by 2% per year, couldn’t you make progress against your personal debt? Then why is it ‘no big deal’ to through in another 2% on top, Steny says.
That kind of thinking is why we do not want to depend on govt for anything. They can’t do anything responsibly.
I like this short piece about Obama breaking his promise: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/03/our-view-on-ear.html
Why, Mr. Obama, do you say one thing, then do something entirely the opposite?
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Dusty
March 11th, 2009
3:53 pm
Well, Mr. 2:52
Thank you for parading as an intellectual to tell us how we are parading as intellectuals. You remind me of those clowns who change IDs to suit each rant and rave. Keep parading, honey, we love a parade.
Wooten brings to our attention a bill that enslaves Americans to debt for decades. It is loaded with “pork”, favors and resurrected past losses to Democrats. He notes that Obama cannot see such items now that he is elected. Obama’s sight was better when he was running in the elections. But he forgets what he said!
Jim Wooten quite properly reminds us of what is coming down the pike. In fact, I think it has already hit us. That does make me a bit emotional. I’m not in debt and I do not want the country swallowed by debt.
Maybe you should get emotional instead of Demo dead to facts. Right now you seem blind in Obama’s headlights. Roadkill aint pretty!!
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fed up
March 11th, 2009
5:04 pm
Hey 2:52, you’re a real funny guy (?). Have you looked at Bookman’s blog lately? The latest was something like “good news, okay not really make something up”. That’s really intellectual. At least Wooten gives us something that’s really happening to debate about rather than Bookman’s which promote name calling and vicious attacks. Bookman then calls out anyone who doesn’t agree with his ideas but lets anyone who does agree with his idealogy say whatever they want. Why don’t you go on over there under your real name and blog away.
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Peter
March 11th, 2009
5:47 pm
Boy this is right on the MARK ……. I second this……. GREAT JOB Posting this !
“david wayne osedach
March 10th, 2009
5:10 pm
You will note that our legislators get their pay raises no matter how bad the recession. I would like to see them (at least offer) to take pay cuts like everyone else.”
YES…..Thank you…..
These are the same guys that are willing to use our tax dollars for what ever….bail out made up Wall Street Instruments….. help Corporate America survive….create a WAR….from the Auto industry perspective….they are asking workers all over America to take a Pay cut….what a concept…..
I know folks who just took a 10% pay cut, and / or a slash in benefits as well….they said yes, they have a job.
Seems the Senate and House didn’t do too good a job running America these past (8) years……and I believe it speaks for both sides of the isle.
They should get a pay cut for their …”COLLECTIVE”… failure……..especially anyone that is now going past 8 years…….
Seems to me if they got paid on merit like Obama is suggesting for teachers…… they would not have “Merited” the (8) secretive pay raises they gave themselves !
Perhaps that is what America needs……
Pay the Senators and Congress folks based on how America is doing ?
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JWG
March 11th, 2009
11:05 pm
If enough right-wings hacks report that Obama promised to end earmarks, then it must be true, right?
Wrong. McCain promised to end earmarks, Obama said he would reform the procedure, he never promised to end earmarks altogether. . It has been reformed a great deal. The earmarks used to be secret, so there was no accountability. Somebody has to decide how the money gets spent. It’s wrong if elected officials do it, but okay if a bureaucrat does? 40% of the earmarks were for republicans who make up roughly 40% of Congress.
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Sharecropper
March 12th, 2009
6:48 am
Don’t be ridiculous. Shut down the government in the midst of our crisis that threatens to destroy us? And McConnell voted against it? Did he remove his more than 50 million in earmarks before he cast a vote he knew would lose? How many earmarks did your pet lapdogs in Georgia put in there? You people are massive hypocrites. If politicians don’t want earmarks, the solution is so simple: don’t insert them into budget bills that have to be passed. Don’t put them in at all. Why is that concept so hard for Wooten?
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Jaye
March 12th, 2009
7:53 am
Obama is President Passive. Mrs. Pelosi is the one wearing the Armani pants in that administration.
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Atlas Shrugging
March 12th, 2009
7:55 am
Hey Dick..you forgot to mention that the 164 blogs on the Bookman post are primarly comprised of idiotic rhetoric between 4 05 5 left and right wing nuts..much like this post.
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
8:02 am
Who would blog at 3:52 am in the exact same tone she would post at 3:52 pm?
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We're Doomed
March 12th, 2009
8:10 am
This Clown we have in the White House is going to bankrupt this country. One day real soon this nation is going to wake up and say, “My God, what have we done by putting this clown in office?”.
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Churchill's MOM
March 12th, 2009
8:11 am
Jim are you on strike? Looks like the Liberal Press is after our girl again.
Levi, Bristol break up
It’s true. You probably don’t believe it.
A source close to Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, mother to Tripp and her fiance, Levi Johnson, father of Tripp, told People the couple broke up a few weeks ago.
The mag reports:
“It kind of just happened,” says the source, referring to the split. “I thought they would stick it out. But I think they can work together to raise Tripp.”
“I’m not sure what caused [them to break up] – it’s common knowledge,” says another source who knows the family.
Despite the breakup, Levi still sees the couple’s son. Levi’s dad, Keith Johnston, told PEOPLE recently that his son is a devoted and “proud father.”
“As for how she is holding up after the split, the source tells PEOPLE: “Bristol’s doing okay. Tripp is fine.”
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:17 am
Throngs of onlookers turned out Thursday morning to seek a glimpse of
Bernard L. Madoff as he arrived in federal court in New York to plead
guilty to operating a vast 20-year Ponzi scheme.
And there is a strong chance that he will not return home, The New York
Times’s Diana B. Henriques writes. Once Mr. Madoff makes his plea, the
legal burden shifts, and his lawyers must then persuade the court that
he should remain free until his sentencing, perhaps more than two
months away.
Meanwhile, the government’s investigation will continue, and the
fallout from the fraud will reverberate for years.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:18 am
India’s fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services closes registrations for
potential bidders on Thursday, kicking off a process to sell a majority
stake in the company caught in the country’s biggest corporate scandal
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:18 am
A representative for the California Media Workers Guild said the union
is trying to cobble together an investor group to buy The San Francisco
Chronicle from Hearst, which has threatened to shut down the
money-losing newspaper.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:19 am
Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, claimed on Wednesday
that Merrill Lynch misled Congress over the timing of its plans to
award billions of dollars in bonuses last December.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:20 am
Bank of America’s finance chief, Joe Price, said this week that he and
most of his industry failed to foresee the economic meltdown in part
because they relied on backward-looking models.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:21 am
Baugur Group, the Icelandic retail investor that crashed along with its
nation’s banks, said Wednesday it would file for bankruptcy after a
court called time on its efforts to reorganize.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:22 am
The Securities and Exchange Commission aims to issue a proposal in
April to restore the so-called uptick rule and will look at other ways
to address short-selling in the stock market, the agency’s chairwoman,
Mary L. Schapiro, confirmed on Wednesday.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:23 am
Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance company, posted a fourth-quarter loss
of $23.9 billion Wednesday and said it would ask for additional
government aid of nearly $31 billion.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 12th, 2009
8:24 am
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the richest man again, overtaking
investor Warren E. Buffett, as the global financial meltdown wiped out
$2 trillion from the net worth of the world’s billionaires, Forbes
Magazine said on Wednesday.
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Peter
March 12th, 2009
8:28 am
Dusty you sound like the French Rulers before the revolution……..
“To compare Wooten’s blog to Bookman’s is like comparing filet mignon to sardines. You’ve got the sardines over at Bookman’s, lotsa them. The steak is here.”
Why didn’t you just say………. “Let them Eat Cake” ?
Well Churchill’s MOM…… You shouldn’t have gone there about the Younger Palin girl…….Remember they Paraded her all over the TV, and at the Convention……That WAS a Proud moment for the “Right Wingers” ! Now she is just like the rest of the “Knocked up kids out there”…..No Daddy for the kid……
Gee funny how that sometimes happens ? Too bad the Parents of this kid didn’t pay attention !
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
8:41 am
Good morning all. While we await Jim, I offer an argument. AJC’s James Salzer offers a detailed summary of a political battle expected today in the Georgia House of Representatives.
“Under legislation the House will consider, people who buy vehicles starting next year won’t pay property taxes on those cars. They also wouldn’t pay a sales tax they’d normally pay if they bought from a dealer. To replace those taxes, all buyers will have to pay a fee of 7 percent, up to a maximum of $2,000, when they title their vehicles. Georgians who keep their present cars will still have to pay the annual property taxes until they buy another one.”
My analysis assumes faithful reporting by Mr. Salzer, and I have no reason to doubt any element of his report. Mr. Salzer implies that there is partisan dispute over whether this bill is a “tax increase.” House Minority Leader DuBose Porter affirms, in unnecessarily prolix language, that it is a tax increase. (I would offer an observation about the redundancy in “politician” and “unnecessarily prolix language,” but Ragnars ought not hurl boulders within glass abodes.)
I infer republican leaders deny Mr. Porter’s charge, even though “Tom Rice (R-Norcross) said the bill will result in state and local governments taking in hundreds of millions of dollars more than they get now from sales taxes on cars sold by dealers and from the annual property taxes. Between $100 million and $150 million of that would go to pay for a new trauma health care system”
Several observations:
(1) Elimination of a property tax is generally a good thing, as wealth taxes are generally bad things. Here the current tax is routinely assessed against a rapidly depreciating asset otherwise often necessary for generation of personal income. Such a tax punishes a wage earner as harshly as the dilettante. I generally favor taxing dilettantes more harshly than wage earners, as the former do not contribute to the weal of society. So that is a point in favor of the general intention of the legislation.
(2) Georgians who keep their present cars still have to pay the tax. Thus there is no tax eliminated for anyone. That is a point against the legislation.
(3) Any change in taxation, that results in “taking in hundreds of millions of dollars more than they get now,” is a tax increase. That is a point against the legislation.
(4) Sponsors of the legislation justify it in order to divert $100 million of taxpayer monies on subsidies to the “impoverished” health care industry. What a crock.
I freely and fairly object to democrats who call wild spending a “stimulus” when it clearly is not. The appellation “liar” is appropriate in such a circumstance, although I generally refrain from applying same.
Similarly, I object to my republicans denying existence of a tax increase when a change results in hundreds of millions of dollars more than they take in now. I object to my republicans selling as “tax elimination” that which does not eliminate anyone’s taxes. I object to my republicans concealing corporate welfare for benefit of the healthiest private industry in the state.
Duplicities of this sort are why national republicans deservedly sit on the sidelines; their state brethren are slow learners pursuing the same path. Those pushing this legislation may not be “my republicans.” Who is running this burlesque?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
9:51 am
Good morning all. The proposed legislation does nothing to reduce costs for businesses – indeed, it promises only to raise labor costs. Businesses are rarely capable of raising prices during a recession, so the new costs of “Employee Free Choice” will not be passed along. There are no meaningful profits to absorb costs now.
In such an environment, employers have only the choice of “outsourcing” as a means of containing costs. India thanks the US Congress, Mexico thanks the US Congress, Philippines thanks the US Congress.
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Churchill's MOM
March 12th, 2009
10:05 am
Looks like the Liberal Press is after our girl again.
Levi, Bristol break up
It’s true. You probably don’t believe it.
A source close to Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, mother to Tripp and her fiance, Levi Johnson, father of Tripp, told People the couple broke up a few weeks ago.
The mag reports:
“It kind of just happened,” says the source, referring to the split. “I thought they would stick it out. But I think they can work together to raise Tripp.”
“I’m not sure what caused [them to break up] – it’s common knowledge,” says another source who knows the family.
Despite the breakup, Levi still sees the couple’s son. Levi’s dad, Keith Johnston, told PEOPLE recently that his son is a devoted and “proud father.”
“As for how she is holding up after the split, the source tells PEOPLE: “Bristol’s doing okay. Tripp is fine.”
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Dan
March 12th, 2009
10:05 am
Jim Wooten has been spitting out right-wing cliches for years, and I usually ignore them. This one gets my goat. Wooten’s logic is the only way to keep jobs in the US is for workers to be paid every year. If we don’t keep taking this hit, our jobs will go to Mexico. I work in a grocery store. Jim, do you really believe the peanut butter shelf is going overseas? Perhaps you should read more than one study on a topic before forming an opinion. EFCA is a small attempt to finally level the playing field at the workplace. If one truly believes in common sense, then fairness shouldn’t make one uncomfortable.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
10:19 am
Conflation, obfuscation and outright lies are being used by the so-called conservatives in trying to make themselves relevant.
The Employee Free Choice Act is about being able to sign-up for union membership, nothing more.
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JIm
March 12th, 2009
10:31 am
It’s amazing to me that Republicans accuse this legislation of having possible dire consequences for our economy. Exactly how did we get into the situation we are currently suffering? It’s not like their policies favoring total employer control have done us any good. I say move over and let labor have their turn. The scare tactics surrounding government arbitration also make me laugh. Arbitrators are not government employees. Arbitrators are skilled in the area of labor relation, are often professionally certified, are ideologically neutral, and often have years of experience in labor/employment law matters. Interest arbitration, if it went that far, would be conducted by a knowledgeable arbitrator. The goal of course, it to promote bargaining between employer and union which has been the overall goal of the NLRA. It’s good legislation introduced at a great time.
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MeMe
March 12th, 2009
10:31 am
Figures that a newspaper in the “FIRE AT WILL” state would publish this.
In the words of Bernie from Home Depot:
“This is the demise of a civilization,” moaned Bernie Marcus, cofounder and former CEO of The Home Depot, during an Oct. 17 conference call about card check. “This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it.”
Mr. Marcus sketched out the doomsday scenario for his listeners, with unions going after what he called the “low hanging fruit” and proceeding to organize workers in industry after industry. He had taken it upon himself to notify the nation’s CEOs of the danger, but they were not yet grabbing their guns. “This is as important as anything that’s ever happened to these companies. And they’re not reacting, and they’re not fighting. The old time fighters are gone.”
But in the class war, as in the real deal, there are always ways of motivating the yellow. “If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys,” Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers “should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs.”
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Reality Check
March 12th, 2009
10:33 am
As a member of management in for a National distributor, I can say without question, that management in most large companies don’t want card check to come law, because it will take away THEIR ability to coerce and intimidate workers. Management has always been able to threaten workers if there was even the hint of talk about a union. Wooton, you should stop giving the company (Republican) line and make an effort to understand the issues before you trash them. The facts tend to go a long way….
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Algonquin J. Calhoun
March 12th, 2009
10:40 am
Jim hates labor unions because they have successfully afforded working people protection from being worked day and night, seven days a week and being paid minimal wages. Jim subscribes to the Wal-Mart model where workers, in China and America, work long hours, receive little pay, no benefits and are subject to the whims and vagaries of management. Jim is the local mouthpiece for the Republinazi Party and refuses to realize the sun has set on the fascist era in America. Go to your farm and express your inane philosophy to the cows Jim. Soon the air will be filled with the dissatisfied lowing of those poor, sonically abused animals!
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Algonquin J. Calhoun
March 12th, 2009
10:42 am
Jim, looks like Trollop Palin is going to have to raise her illegitimate progeny alone. What are your feelings about Trollop and her two children?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
10:49 am
Labor unions serve a valuable function in our society. If you don’t believe it, just ask General Motors.
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Reality Check
March 12th, 2009
10:52 am
Ragnar, Please don’t blame the problems at GM soley on the unions… Crappy managment with worse ideas are more to blame. the union have not done the company any favors, But the were absolutely essential to the growth of the middle class in this country.
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Temp
March 12th, 2009
10:54 am
OK then if the interest is really fairness, let’s make card check work the other way as well. If 50% of the employees sign a card to get rid of a union, then the union no longer represents workers at that workplace.
In the interest of fairness, workers can leave a company any time they want and employers can fire workers any time they want with no requirements by either party.
In the interest of fairness, employees can strike any time they want and employers can lock out workers any time they want.
In the interest of fairness, employees and workers can negotiate any salary and benefits they want, including something below minimum wage.
After all, it’s only fair, right?
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STFU
March 12th, 2009
10:56 am
I say we just keep doing things the same way they were done the last 8 years. That’s working really well. Plus we should follow all advice from the south, seeing as they get all the welfare from the federal government.
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STFU
March 12th, 2009
10:57 am
Bristol Palin is a tramp, just like her momma.
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Reality Check
March 12th, 2009
11:01 am
Temp @10:54 With the exception of Min wage, that is already the case. Now what???
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real conservative
March 12th, 2009
11:06 am
Enter your comments here
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:10 am
Just sign the card, Bub, and nobody gets hurt. Think of it as an “insurance” policy.
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Algonquin J. Calhoun
March 12th, 2009
11:10 am
Ragweed, the workers at GM merely built the automobiles. Management drove the company into the dirt! They built ill-conceived gas hogs that were poorly designed. The workers put that crap together. They did their jobs. Management did not! Workers of the world unite!
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:13 am
Dear Reality @ 10:52/11:52, good afternoon. I don’t think the uninspired management of GM was as relevant to its destruction as CAFE and legacy health care for unionized employees.
Even now the large vehicle lines are profitable; only those small vehicle lines maintained for the sake of fleet compliance with CAFE are unprofitable. I broadly agree that, but for the misguided act of Congress, GM would have been able to survive the union’s contribution to its problems.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:17 am
Dear Algonquin @ 11:10, would you amend card check to also prohibit companies from paying any expenses for legacy employees? Would you amend card check to make it reciprocal, so that a company can produce signed cards to decertify a union?
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
11:19 am
CNN just reported that an Iraqi man was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoes over Niagra Falls.
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Curious Observer
March 12th, 2009
11:20 am
I’m still not getting the full picture of the mechanism for card check. Under this bill, would workers simply hand their cards to some representative, or are the workers to deposit them in some kind of locked box? If the former, I can see a basis for the argument about worker intimidation. If the latter, I don’t buy that argument at all.
In any case, the current situation is totally unfair to workers who wish to unionize, and it has been that way for many years. Not only are they subject to immediate termination if their desires are known, but also they can be forced by employers to attend anti-union meetings organized by their employers–see WalMart. The obstacles to forming a union are so severe that not many organizations will become unionized under the current system.
I would like to see what the current language of EFCA says before I comment any further. If workers are given the protection of making their wishes known secretly under EFCA, then I’m all for the bill as a way of unionizing without the hell workers must currently go through to do so. If not, I have real reservations about it.
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Preparing for the Fight: EFCA « As We Now Think
March 12th, 2009
11:21 am
[...] especially corporate–interests. Led by the Chamber of Commerce, opponents of EFCA have been very effective in driving the popular narrative of the Act as an anti-democratic attempt to rob workers of their [...]
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:24 am
The biggest problem with card check is the same as with every initiative of the democrats – it raises expenses for business. Democrats imagine that businesses produce money out of air. There are only two ways for businesses to cover new higher expenses – pass those expenses along to customers, or cut other expenses.
The only significant areas of our economy not already unionized, and thus eligible for the “benefit” of card check, are the “service” sector. How much more are you willing to pay to use an ATM so banks will be able to pay for their unionized work force. Will you pay $4 for a quarterpounder? Or are those businesses going to suffer a loss of business?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:26 am
Dear Chris @ 11:19/12:19, if he threw his shoes over Niagra Falls, the Blue Jays need him to play right field.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
11:32 am
Notice how those that do not support unions/laborers do not argue the harm the legislation will cause and associated costs.
They continue to use truisms and half-truths. No facts, not able to substantiate the arguments.
I hope they continue with this process as everyone is able to see the depth and breadth of their argument(s).
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MIkey72
March 12th, 2009
11:40 am
“Curious Observer” raises a good question. My biggest problem with the bill (as I have read about it in the media) is the elimination of a secret-ballot vote. If the unions thought they had a legitimate argument to make for their organization, they should not fear a standard election. Intimidation works both ways. Companies have been guilty of scaring workers away from unions, and unions have tried to scare workers into joining their ranks. The government needs to step in as an honest referee to make sure a fair, secret vote should take place. Circumventing this process will harm, not help, all workers.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:48 am
Dear jackie and all other supporters of card check, you avoid the fundamental truth at the heart of the legislation. Unions always lose secret elections. Thus you have to find a way to avoid a secret election to unionize. Do you not grasp the implications there, the “how” that accompanies the winning campaign where there is no secret election?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:50 am
Dear Mlkey72 @ 11:40/12:40, the proponents of the legislation will be quick to tell you that their legislation does not “abolish” the secret election, it merely adds another means of unionizing. Of course, the alternate means that permits circumvention of a secret election will become the preferred method of the unions.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
11:53 am
Dear Jackie @ 11:32, you would argue that those of us who would preserve the secret election for laborers are opposed to the laborers, and those of you who would abolish – either de facto or de jure – the secret election are protecting the laborers. A curious logic, that.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
12:16 pm
@Ragnar,
The wordsmith skills are superb.
However, a careful review of what you have said is double-speak.
A secret ballot would be best for everyone concerned. Letting the worker decide if they want to become a member of a union and have said union certified by the National Labor Review Board is in everyone’s best interest.
If the workers choose to decertify a union, so be it.
So, to give a a straight answer, I support the secret ballot and the workers desire to have that union represent them in negotiations with the employer.
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Gary
March 12th, 2009
12:23 pm
I love my unions,AFT,NEA,AFL CIO.
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Mac
March 12th, 2009
12:26 pm
If it weren’t for a union, Jim and his colleagues would be paid like folks at the Tifton Gazette and Cherokee Tribune – in other words, like rookie school teachers. Thank the Guild for your gold, Jim.
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Mac
March 12th, 2009
12:28 pm
By the way, that’s the 20-year veterans being paid like rookie school teachers.
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Leon
March 12th, 2009
12:30 pm
Rag, I don’t understand the aversion to CAFE standards. Fuel efficient cars? Sounds like a good idea to me. Perhaps you have a lot of big oil stocks in your portfolio? All the more reason for the USA to be beholden to the mideast oil tit right? Typical right wing short sighted thinking as usual.
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Temp
March 12th, 2009
12:35 pm
@Reality Check: Completely untrue. There is no language in the card check bill to allow members to decertify a union through card check. That still must be done with a secret ballot.
Not only must employers pay unemployment insurance for workers, but employers with 100 or more full-time workers must give 60 days’ warning of a closing or layoff to both workers and government officials when shutting down an operation affecting 50 or more full-time workers. An employee can walk out the door at any moment with no notice and no obligation.
Several states require companies engaged in lockouts to pay either unemployment and/or benefits for locked out workers.
In each of these scenarios, companies have many obligations to the workers, but workers have none in return. Hardly strikes me as fair.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
1:33 pm
Dear Jackie @ 12:18/1:16, my wordsmith skills must be better than you perceive. We are in full agreement on the need to preserve secret elections. The proposed legislation would obviate the need for a secret election.
Dear Leon @ 12:30/1:30, you ask a fair question. My aversion to CAFE arises from my aversion to anything that substitutes the economic judgment of legislators for that of those with an actual stake in the success of the economic entity. I would allow the market to determine whether production of fuel-efficient cars is wise. I know that sounds like nonsense, as small cars are inherently more economical for the owners. Small cars inherently have smaller production costs, and will cover less overhead. For high cost producers (due to their labor contracts) such as the American car makers, there is no hope of competing with foreign name plates. Thus I would allow the American car makers to make only what is profitable for them, and they would thus yield the lower-profitability markets to their competitors. Win-win.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
1:37 pm
And dear Leon @ 12:30/1:30, your apology for slander is accepted. All who know me know that I own only mutual funds. I suspect the short-sighted thinker between us was the one who did not contemplate comparative production costs of the automakers.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
1:39 pm
And I amend my 1:33/2:33 answer to allow for Temp’s truthful clarification, the proposed legislation does not change the requirement for a secret election to decertify. Secret elections are appropriate in that case also – secret elections, where people are required to prove eligibility to vote, keep all parties honest.
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David Miller
March 12th, 2009
1:45 pm
Go to this hyperlink THEN talk about supporting EFCA:
http://thesunnews.typepad.com/opinionblog/2009/03/employee-free-choice-would-be-a-jobkiller.html
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cranky old man
March 12th, 2009
1:47 pm
Let’s assume for a moment that the right wing article of faith that says unions kill jobs is correct. What kind of jobs? Low wage jobs with no benefits or pensions. Currently, most families in this country who are “getting by” are doing so by having more than one wage-earner (or by having a wage-earner with more than one job). In the past few decades, there has been a massive increase in the number of women in the job market. Now, I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t be there if that’s what they want. But it would be nice if one parent or the other had the OPTION of staying home because one income was enough.
The increase of women in the workforce was just the first phase in the right wing’s war against living wages. And, ironically enough, it wasn’t even something they planned, In fact, many conservatives railed against it when it first started to happen. But they were more than happy to change their tune when they realized the benefits to be had from downward pressure on wages. Next came off-shoring. And for those sectors of the job market that can’t be exported because the worker has to be physically present in the country to do the job (construction, landscaping, house painting, agriculture, hotel maids, etc.), employers have discovered the joys of illegal immigrants.
Notice how plumbers and electricians haven’t been displaced by illegal labor on a large scale? This is partly because of the specialized training required, but also due to the existence of unions and licensing requirements.
As for the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, simply remove the incentive by adding a sufficient tariff for manufactured goods and services from countries that don’t have the same labor, safety, and environmental laws we have. The tariffs don’t need to be so high as to make it impossible for other nations to sell their goods here. Just high enough to remove the advantage of not having to buy safety and pollution control equipment and paying workers less due to the lower cost of living in other countries. Make them compete on quality and efficiency instead.
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
1:57 pm
President Hussein just can not catch a break!
2 arrested in FBI raid at Obama appointee’s office
es tell WTOP.
Yusuf Acar, 40, an employee of the D.C. Office of the CTO was taken into custody by FBI agents at his home in Northwest D.C.
Sushil Bansal, President and CEO of Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation (AITC) was also arrested, sources tell WTOP.
In 2008, Bansal’s firm received .Net Development Support and Peoplesoft Consulting Support contracts from the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Office totaling $350,000.
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=596&sid=1622618
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
1:58 pm
For anyone who ever blogs on Bookmans corner of the AJC. If you call him a hypocrite you get banned.
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
1:58 pm
CNN just reported that the guy who survived his swan dive over Niagra Falls has lost his speedo commercial endorsement deal for smoking pot. The olympics has also recalled and disqualified all his medals. (he got a 9.9 for his dive, btw)
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fed up
March 12th, 2009
1:59 pm
Peter what are you talking about? Because Bristol Palin isn’t getting married there’s “no father for the kid”.
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Carly N
March 12th, 2009
2:18 pm
For all of you “free choice” supporters, please explain this data.
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/02/studies-confirm-high-unionization.html
It shows that everywhere you have strong unions, you have higher unemployment and lower wages. And the graphs also show that when you have weak unions, you have higher employment and higher wages.
The UAW’s fine example with GM, Ford and Chrysler are a perfect example.
Big union bosses are like government: monopolies that are unaccountable.
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
2:29 pm
Carly N,
these libs don’t understand that the UAW has single handedly killed the American auto industry. Sam Walton was smart when he said that unions would kill Wal Mart. He’s laughing from his grave.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
2:32 pm
@Carly N
What union has design control any product?
It appears to me, the union members can only fabricate the product as designed and marketed by those in management.
Secondly, those areas that have low wages and are not unionized, such as Alabama, have those wages subsidized by the taxpayers. If you recall, the state gave the manufactures incentives to move to the state and provide approximately 2,000 jobs.
You indicate you have weak unions and strong wages. I would submit your numbers are wrong when it relates to wages. My research indicates the average for those weak union workers is roughly $15.00 per hour without extensive benefits.
Who was the winner here?
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Leon
March 12th, 2009
2:50 pm
Rag neither apology required, nor slander inferred. Not familiar with your investment strategy. Alas it was the automakers shortsightedness that led them to believe that $1.00 per gallon gas would last ad infinitum. Why else would they lobby so ferociously against CAFE? Tsk Tsk
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Fred
March 12th, 2009
2:58 pm
Unions: the only way a high school dropout can earn $60k/year for screwing in light bulbs. Life is so unfair that way.
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Chaz
March 12th, 2009
3:09 pm
If a unionized workforce and near-complete control of government by Democrats leads to happiness and prosperity, please explain the state of Michigan to me.
I’ll take my Red State independence, thank you.
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Debate101
March 12th, 2009
3:10 pm
TO ALL THE CONSERVATIVES ON THIS BLOG WHO BELIEVE THAT ONLY THE WORKING POOR ARE LOOSING THEIR HOMES, DUE TO BAD DECISIONS. THIS GUY IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF SOMEONE WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SURVIVE, BUT I GUESS HE JUST LIKED LIVING THE HIGH LIFE. FYI.. Taken from an MSNBC article, with picture and a diary of what happened.
Rip Brown, 48, grew up in New England and, with a college degree and MBA, began a career in commercial banking in the 1980s. By the 1990s, married with two children, he was building a solid resume as a corporate controller for several Fortune 500 companies, including W.R. Grace and Wal-Mart. In 2005, he set up a global consulting business with clients in Europe and Mexico. But Brown’s fortunes shifted. In 2004, to pay for his daughters’ education, he borrowed against the rising value of the Boston home he bought in 2002. By 2006, unable to cover the cost of running his business, he declared bankruptcy but continued to pay on the house. In 2007, his mortgage rate jumped three percentage points to 11 percent, more than he could afford. Hoping to work out more affordable terms with the bank, he took on a long-term project in New York last year. In November, Brown’s client prematurely terminated the project after the banking crisis shut their credit line. Out of work since, his 18-month struggle to save his home finally ended in foreclosure on Jan. 29 at 2 p.m.
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Glenn
March 12th, 2009
3:10 pm
Such a broad political spectrum, almost a cross section, of Americans I’ve known or run across for 30 years have wished for a resurgence of a union movement that could make us vigorous again. Remember in the recession during the early ’80s when we developed a Shakespearean envy of the productivity of the Japanese, when every other paperback in the last-chance airport bookshops was preaching to us about what they had and we didn’t?
The answer then was dubbed “workplace democracy”; roughly speaking, workers informing the production processes as well as the product. It all seemed to make sense then, and I just assumed that anything Stateside that still called itself the Democratic Party would snap it up in a heartbeat.
Not so. I watched again and again as the Democratic leadership rejected planks that would nail down aspects of workplace democracy into the Democratic Party Platform.
And now I know why. They preferred to rig the game for their labor paymasters and paymistresses.
And now the chickens come home.
Swell.
Bye, bye, jobs.
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
3:19 pm
I’ve been banned by many blogs, andy. I tend to swoop into a blog and blow minds. I dont know why I do that. All I really want to do is make friends and have people like me.
But let’s look at these strange blogs on the AJC. Take today’s Wooten topic. In the first sentence, Wooten expects a reader to believe that he could predict which way this economy might turn and which administration would be responsible. The sheer arrogance could only foment from a bitter, confused, disenfranchised mind. Yet, I know for a fact that Jim Wooten is one of the nicest guys you can ever meet.
That brings up the new era we are all in. The era of tectonic group think. Global think. The internet has bound us all into one gigantic schizophrenic monster. We demand justice, but we don’t want to pay for it. We don’t even want to pay our taxes. Christians believe that it’s a sin to evade income taxes. Christ was crucified by men who were delinquent in their quarterly tax payments, you know. They had all received warning letters that very morning, and boy, were they in a mood to get even with someone…….
So God is a Keynesian Leviathon. I don’t know what that means.
Jackie, if you think that ragnar’s word-smithing, (”you would argue that those of us who would preserve the secret election for laborers are opposed to the laborers, and those of you who would abolish – either de facto or de jure – the secret election are protecting the laborers. A curious logic, that.”), is superb, then there is no hope for a real writer. Did you get a load of what the AJC presented as finalist’s editorials for the job of New Conservative Writer for the AJC? I’m I the only one who was dismayed? and shocked? and was I the only one who will write like a devil possessed by the illegitimate child of Keats and Yeats to punish everyone responsible for this travesty of journalistic ethic??????
I call this the “Yanni” effect. Yanni rose to superstardom with the most mediocre music I ever heard. People settled for it. Somehow. And the Yanni effect lives on these blogs. I’m sure Yanni got many emails and letters and even twitters of adoration for his Symphonic Cacophonies.
Rag is a Blogging Yawni, in every possible pun of that word. His measured ombudsmanship belongs in a crease up Rush Limbaugh’s dimpled butt, where rag’s nose for news is certain to be born again, him being such a crack christian and all……
Rag: you contribute so much to this blog. You’re always there. Commenting. We are inundated with your graceful turns. You have such a marvelously unexpected way with words. It would be a disservice to journalism if you were ever to let a few minutes go by without posting one of your 79 comments you apply to the common good each day on this poor blog.
We all wait, for the master with baited breath. What will he say next?
(camera to all lurkers everywhere showing faces expressing wide-eyed anticipation…….)
Jklol
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
3:22 pm
If the unions are so bad, why is the American manufacturing workforce the most productive in the world?
The American workforce works longer hours and takes less vacation than any other country in the world, yet, their wages are falling.
The American workforce is tied into a specific company because of health care, other benefits and pensions.
Other countries in the world do not have to concern themselves with health care as part of their overhead, therefore, their unit cost are lower. If one recalls, the USA has the MOST EXPENSIVE health care system in the wordl; not the best.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
3:24 pm
@Chris Broe,
Rag is a prodigious and profuse writer that one must read carefully to understand the point he is making.
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Temp
March 12th, 2009
3:24 pm
@cranky old man
“Let’s assume for a moment that the right wing article of faith that says unions kill jobs is correct.” I would rather state my article of faith as being, “A person and an employer are free to negotiate any and all terms of the job as they see fit.” If employees want to organize, by all means do so. If an employer wants to fire anyone who joins a union, by all means feel free. The choice and the freedom should be there for all.
“The increase of women in the workforce was just the first phase in the right wing’s war against living wages.” Surely you jest. The increase of women in the workforce was driven first by World War II (Rosie the riveter, et al) and then the women’s liberation movement starting in the 50s. Hardly a right wing conspiracy there.
The reduction in wages is simple economics. You have a large increase in available workers due to more women working, without a corresponding increase in the number of jobs.
As for off shoring, there is nothing sacred or special about the American worker. Why does a worker in India or China or the Philippines not have the same right to a job that you do? They work just as hard, have the same level of education and charge 1/3 the price. Why would I not offshore? Just as companies have to compete in the global economy, so do workers.
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
3:30 pm
Jackie,
do you have documentation to prove that?
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David S
March 12th, 2009
3:34 pm
I certainly hope that if this legislation passes that the anti-union employees in companies band together and proactively inflict harsh violence and intimidation on the union organizers. It may be their only means of self defense in the face of what will likely be a wave of violence and imtimidation upon intelligent american workers who know better than to join unions. The history of the depression chronicles thousands of incidents of violence against employees once pro-union legislation was enacted. Look for either the same to happen or as many have rightly said – flight to more business friendly countries.
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David S
March 12th, 2009
3:37 pm
Jackie, Union memebership has never been lower. Most manufacturing jobs in this country are not unionized. That is why they are so productive. Look at the ones dominated by unions (GM, FORD, CHRYSLER)need I say more?
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Glenn
March 12th, 2009
3:48 pm
Jackie and others,
The Democratic Party seems to have become “democratic” in name only. Something like the German National Social Workers Party, which was certainly German and certainly nationalistic, but which was not really a party and which, above all, regarded “workers” as slaves of a despotic State; or, consider the fabulist moniker, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Today’s Democratic Party actively seeks to topple the workers’ secret ballot, the chief pillar of workplace democracy. What better proof do we need that the Party truly does “seek power for its own sake”, as Orwell put it, in this disgusting pecuniary exchange for the unions’ help in seating a new Democratic incumbent?
Barack Obama is as shameless as an old Emperor in new clothes getting older and moldier by the minute.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
3:51 pm
@Communist AJC
Run a Google on any information I presented.
@David S
You are correct, union membership is the lowest it has ever been because most southern states have adopted the policy of “Right To Work.”
As you know, the quantity of people working in an facility does not equate to efficiency. It is the number of units produced in the least amount of time and with the least cost.
The union members of the UAW are in fact more productive than those at Toyota, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, Mercedes, BMW facilities. One can not equate efficiency of the product with the engineering as the workers do not have control over what is designed and why the design is such that it may fall off the auto after a period of time.
I think it is design obsolescence as to why so many of the past American products were so bad.
Four of the top 10 autos in the J.D. Powers ratings are from the Big Three.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
3:57 pm
@Glenn,
Good to speak with you, but have to vehemently disagree with you.
The Democrats have many faults, but being National Socialists is not one of them.
If you have ever heard the term, “…either you take the jobs to the slaves, or take the slaves to the jobs” leads one to believe that the current movement of jobs outside the USA is by design.
As you know, one of the easiest way to directly affect the bottom line of the Balance Sheet is to reduce your Direct Labor costs.
I have argued that one of the most corrosive terms used in our business lexicon is Return On Investment (ROI). How and why do you measure this?
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
4:04 pm
A eye-popping example of why the Repubs are one the verge of being irrelevant.
“To receive the full amount of stimulus money available, lawmakers would need to adjust the time period used to determine whether people are eligible for benefits.
Texas also is being asked to expand eligibility to include thousands of low-wage workers. Lawmakers have said the change would help part-time employees like single mothers, college students and senior citizens.
Perry’s decision comes despite warnings from Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Tom Pauken that the state’s unemployment compensation trust fund could be operating at a deficit by October. Pauken told lawmakers recently that insolvency might not be not far behind.”
Was this decision made to help the people or help the politician?
Keep it up Repubs, you have not run out of ammunition that you use to shoot yourselves in the foot. You might right out of feet.
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JLK
March 12th, 2009
4:12 pm
Yo, so called “conservatives”: Why were unions formed in the first place? Anyone? Anyone? If you don’t like unions, then I suggest you work to ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR UNIONS.
Employees are well and fairly treated are much less likely to rock the boat and make demands on the Captain. It was slave wages, unsafe working conditions, inhumane hours, and the knowledge that no matter how hard they worked, they could NEVER get a tiny fraction of the rewards the boss was reaping for their labor, that resulted in the rise of unions in this country. YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW. That the “conservative” tactic is to lie, strong-arm, and use their bought & paid-for legislators to remove the thorn of unions from the side of big money indicates that the fight for unionization IS warranted. As usual, you prove the point while trying to disprove it.
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Dusty
March 12th, 2009
4:28 pm
Well, I am not an authority on such matters as discussed here today. But I always thought that unions were very good back when they were needed. Coal mines without safety standards, factory workers with low wages, long hours and bad working environments. Steel mills with little protection against obvious dangers. Unions were needed.
But time moved along and “business” got wiser (with uniion impetus) and saw that good working conditions meant better output. That investors not millionaires alone had something to say about working conditions. Times changed.
It seems to me that unions are now the fake dinosauers of today. They try to be big, step on companies, demand their rights and not the individual’s. But their effect on management is small when economic times are difficult.
Perhaps unions should concentrate on new goals to increase employment, not find faults with the companies supplying jobs. The government is strong enough to set standards. The unions can only quibble about them now and work for union power, even political power, but not necessarily worker power.
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
4:36 pm
The american auto industry is not a good example of how unions affect our economic cycle. You’d have to live in Detroit in the decade of the Seventies to understand what the Unions meant to the American Dream. You’d have to pretend that the Great Depression and WW2 didn’t happen, or that the baby boomers in Detroit didn’t all eat a reality sandwich called, “you’ll have to forgive my parents, you see, they grew up during the Depression.” You’d have to imagine that Detroit wasn’t populated by upwardly mobile blue collar racists in the Seventies.
The Seventies: Power to the People. Right on! Far out! Got any Peyote? The Doobie Brothers. Dont Bogart that Joint, my friend. Happiness is walking to your neighborhood school (vs Busing). Pre-aids, sex was wide open, and never has sex been a ubiquitous presumption for dinner and a movie like it was in the Seventies.
What economic cycle is being deranged by unions? America is as America does. History is destiny. We The People are finally communicating in real time. 1776.com. Lafayette Twitter: “The British are a bore. They keep attacking us here on Breed’s Hill, and we keep killing them. Yet they insist on returning to close range, where we kill more of them and then they run back down the hill like little little baby bunnies. Oh darn, I went over the 25 words or less limit on Twittering. Cheerio!”
But the British went to the pubs and spent money that night. The economy there boomed. Get real. Don’t blame Obama for Bush or Ike or Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt or Garfield.
In fact, don’t do nothing. Just sit there and stfu. Que sera, sera, what ever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see……..Nobody saw this recession coming. Nobody except the end of the spectrum of bulls and bears that exist at any given moment.
Jklol.
Betsy Ross was naked when she sewed our flag.
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Glenn
March 12th, 2009
4:40 pm
I still say we’re pretty close to being on the same page here. What I mean is that there’s old-timey unionism — the muscle play, the bosses, the teriff-wall protectionism, the throwing around of pension funds and election foot-soldiers to gamble on temporary political power — and then there’s what we’ve long hoped for: a newer unionism based on the obvious need of workers to have a larger hand in decisions that shape their lives through the lives of the companies that employ them.
In American Law, are acknowledged to possess — because the unions won them, more-or-less fair and square — special consideration in the area of property rights, the principle concern of our federal Constitution. Chief among these special considerations is the right to collective bargaining, which was gained because a long succession of court cases found that labor unions have constituted something like the closest we’ve ever come, as a People, to direct democracy. Closer than the House of Representatives; closer than county, parish or city governance.
If we institute a new regime in which union membership, and therefore union votes, are dictated by intimidation, then the courts eventually will, I think, begin to roll back the right to binding arbitration. Binding arbitration is, by definition, a contract, and all contracts are, by definition, entered into volitionally by all parties.
Coercion is not an option.
Suasion is.
Let’s win this time fair and square.
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Glenn
March 12th, 2009
4:45 pm
I wish I’d edited that. I meant “principal” when I typed “principle”, and I’d meant to say, in opening the second paragraph, that UNIONS “…are acknowledged”.
Sorry. I get heated in these debates. So many hours, for such small wages…
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
4:54 pm
Jackie, I want you to write, in 25 words or less, why you love being an American. If you succeed, then I will know that you understand the power of words. Then I will know that your appreciation of Rag has merit, other than being a cliche of a groupie wrapped in a grouping of cliches.
I gave you an example of rag’s problem. I used quotes. He wrote that bountiful feast of implication, inference, and deduction.
Be careful. This comment is a test and a trap, and if you fail, nobody will read you ever again.
Jklol
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Glenn
March 12th, 2009
4:55 pm
Chris Broe,
You fricking brain worm.
The thought of Robin Williams as plagiarist was bad enough, but Betsy Ross as nudist — I tell you…
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
5:00 pm
Glenn, R U insane? I minored in psych and I gotta say, you need teams of psychiatrists working around the clock at the university level in Vienna. (Seinfeld).
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Misterearl
March 12th, 2009
5:09 pm
When Lennon said, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” Bible-belt Christians roared with anger. They burned Beatles records, banned Beatles songs on the radio and boycotted Beatles concerts. They tolerated no rival claims to the messiah. When Limbaugh uttered a parallel claim, those who see Christianity under attack offered no response. No cry of cultural hostility toward religion was heard. No demand for an apology boomed from pulpits. No boycott was launched.
Why is that?
Why is it that the Christian Right reacted with such reverence to a man who, through thinly disguised humor, disclosed his prideful self-perception and espoused a worldview that counters the biblical witness? Are they afraid of Limbaugh? Are they afraid of his followers who pack their pews?
What explains the fact that Limbaugh can speak untruthfully, and yet he goes unchallenged by conservative Christians? He certainly spoke untruthfully at CPAC when he said that conservatives did not see other people with contempt. Yet he exhibited contempt in his comments about Senators Harry Reid and John Kerry.
When Limbaugh asserted that President Obama “portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night,” that he wants to destroy the United States and that he was fueling “class envy,” his untruthfulness went unchallenged. Limbaugh claimed, “We don’t hate anybody.” Yet he proceeded to speak hatefully about Obama, defending his statement that he hoped Obama failed, which was hardly endearing speech.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
5:12 pm
@Chris Broe
Sorry!
Trying to prove that I love America is a false negative, which can never be proven.
Secondly, my comments about Rag are an overview of how Rag constructs his sentences with vague innuendo and duplicity. As stated previously, one has to read his postings very, very carefully to understand what he IS NOT saying.
Third, I could never prove to YOU that I have an understand of words and their power.
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Misterearl
March 12th, 2009
5:12 pm
- Robert Parham
Limbaugh’s Unrighteous Hold on Christian Right
The Washington Post
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
5:19 pm
Most of the shorts have covered. If this isn’t the bottom then Cash is King.
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
5:21 pm
THIS ISN’T GOING TO END WELL FOR DEMOCRATS.
Waters Helped Bank Whose Stock She Once Owned
California Democrat Has Championed Minority-Owned OneUnited on Capitol Hill and Criticized Its Government Regulators
By SUSAN SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — When Rep. Barney Frank was looking to aid a Boston-based lender last fall, the Massachusetts Democrat urged Maxine Waters, a colleague on the House Financial Services Committee, to “stay out of it,” he says.
The reason: Ms. Waters, a longtime congresswoman from California, had close ties to the minority-owned institution, OneUnited Bank.
Ms. Waters and her husband have both held financial stakes in the bank. Until recently, her husband was a director. At the same time, Ms. Waters has publicly boosted OneUnited’s executives and criticized its government regulators during congressional hearings. Last fall, she helped secure the bank a meeting with Treasury officials.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123682571772404053.html
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
5:22 pm
Jackie,
why would I google what I asked YOU to present?
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
5:24 pm
That’s not fair, Jackie. You protect a premise with a conclusion. No, a false negative is like a edible jockstrap. You commit to sodomy long before your soul gets the sugar rush. I wont be trifled with. Y do U luv America?
Answer true, or I call Homeland Security. U R A sleeper cell trying to trick the patriots who blog here.
Jackie: U R on the spot: Y do U luv America?
Oh, be quick. (dialing here)
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 12th, 2009
5:27 pm
Dear PoFo @ 4:36/5:36, “.Nobody saw this recession coming.” You cut me to the quick. I forecast the recession every day for a year after Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that the Bush tax cuts would not be renewed. I’m quite certain you even chastised me for saying the same thing over and over. Must I sew flags naked to be noticed?
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
5:35 pm
@Communist AJC
You can Goggle because you are adept keyboard warrior.
@Chris Broe,
You can go play in the traffic, as I do not have to prove nor explain any thing to you. As for your snide conjectures, you have stated nothing more than what you fantasize. Are you still counting pervert?
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Glenn
March 12th, 2009
5:38 pm
Chris Broe,
You minored in Psych? Really? That must’ve been Home Ec. for you. They made me study that BS for seven — count ‘em, seven — years, and I never, ever saw a bigger pantload (excepting maybe the Developmentalists, and perhaps Jung). Still, I toadied, and bellied up to The Bar.
How could an honorable Cynic such as yourself so deign?
Horseslop.
gtg
P.S. Although Abnormal Psych seems always to have been robust, productive and full of promise. I’ll give them that.
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
6:01 pm
Jackie,
if I rant and rave about a certain subject I usually back it up with facts. I don’t ask others to do it for me. Thanks for playing.
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Jackie
March 12th, 2009
6:09 pm
@Communist AJC
I have not ranted nor raved about any subject.
My facts can be found by you or anyone else that cares to verify.
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CommunistAJC
March 12th, 2009
6:32 pm
Can anyone explain how we are supposed to believe PresBo?
Obama: Economic crisis ‘not as bad as we think’
WASHINGTON (AP) – Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.
Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation’s “confidence builder in chief,” Obama said Americans shouldn’t be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was “highly optimistic” about the long term.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D96SP30G5&show_article=1
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bja
March 12th, 2009
6:33 pm
Small independently owned businesses will find themselves targeted by union representatives if this bill passes.
In Michigan, it is common for businesses with only five employees to end up with a union.
This proposed rule would allow union organizers to take employees out to the bar, and after getting them all drunk, get them to sign the card check. And with that, the union is in.
Don’t think this won’t happen, because it is how unions operate.
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
6:44 pm
Liberalism defined here: Justice. (google it)
Now that you’ve googled it, lets talk: what if 2,598 billionaires managed to thwart the six billions of people on this planet by using legal and constitutional means available to anyone so that they could possess and control 90% the wealth of the entire planet? That would not be justice.
Capitalism only works in the arena of war. We are systematically destroying ourselves. It only takes one country to launch a global nuclear war. We are sellouts. We write what we are paid to write. If we are to be financially successful we must pander to Common Sense Conservatism. The Common Sense Conservatism is whatever Wallstreet and the Bomb Industry pays the Wootens to say it is.
There is no way we can survive. We need war to show economic projections that point upward. That’s the only way to get to the top. That’s the only way that a properly-educated christian American can fulfill the American Dream.
We are as finished as completely as the Sioux Indians were finished, in 1876, when they decided to leave the reservation and attack the US Army’s Seventh Cavalry, who were only obeying our Constitutionally elected mandate to properly align our topographical demographics with the media-inspired Rush of Capitalization upon which our Christians riffed the justification of laws from which we distilled the disenfranchisement of our muddied multitudes: National Resources against National Population. The end game of Capitalism: the salt is worth more than the salt of the earth.
Well, Glenn et al, I’m here today 2 tell U 2 tell who ever sent U that we don’t just jury-nullify, but instead, we human-nullify your laws. U R obsolete.
Wooten, Glenn, and Andy, and JBMlaw: I suggest you conform to the human paradox: Is a human being a particle or a wave? That is, is one human worthy as all humans are worthy? Or, is one human only one human with some arbitrary vision of progressive potential, and damned be those who were in the path of the toxic dumps that never occurred to the opportunistic visionary?
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
7:04 pm
Why do jackie, glenn, rag, and andy use the same exact syntax? Are they in the same boiler room/bar with laptops drinking and drunk-mob ruling? Sure reads like that to me.
You know you clowns represent the ideology that hasn’t worked for two hundred years. We get it: The economy is cyclical. Yes, capitalism is great when it’s great ( for a handful), but what about the masses? For two hundred years you’ve given us Bud Light.
It’s over. Just leave. I suggest Dubai. Cheney and Bush are Kings over there. You’ll be quite popular!
Obama is not the end of Conservatism. He’s the beginning of the end of Conservatism. Rag, you should be ashamed trying to mix analchord with compromised republicanism. You cant be me. I know that hurts. But you can levy justicefor all by foreclosing your own greed. You can be a living trust for trust itself. You can make a difference.
We face obliteration. Decide quick or sit next to me near the campfire. I’ve got the marsh mellows. Someone grab a guitar. Pass the bong. Lets just sing in unison till conservatism destroys us all.
Should there be billionaires? NO! Any profit over 100 million dollars for any individual should be taxed at 90 per cent. The death tax? 90 per cent! Yes! If someone dies, then he should forfeit what ever he earned to society. He’s dead! His offspring? Let them know the human experience of belonging to the times and the mass condition. Nobody deserves anything more than anybody else. Period.
I’m willing to civil war over it. I dont care what you think you deserve over me or anyone other american. Soon that sentiment will extend to the starving in Sri Lanka.
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Kamchak
March 12th, 2009
7:15 pm
Mr. Wooten cites a report by Anne Layne-Farrar of LECG Consulting. The title of this study is: An Empirical Assesment of The Employee Free Choice Act: The Economic Implications. Perhaps The Associated Builders and Contractors sponsored the study, funny that she didn’t them. She did however acknoledge financial support by a gruop with the rather innocuous sounding name The Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs. This is a moniker that has spinmeister Frank Luntz stink all over it. Dig a little and the HR Policy Association turns up.
“HR Policy Associationbrings together the Chief Human Resource Officers of more than 260 of the largest corporations in the United States. Representing nearly ever major industry sector, HR Policy members have a combined market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and employ 18 million employees worldwide The association mission is to assist large employers in using their collective leverage of the membership to further critically important business and societal objectives.”(http//www.hrpolicy.org/about_indexaspx)
Wow a membership that uses a collective leverage. Sounds kinda like a union. Also sounds a bit like “don’t do as we do, do as we tell you to do.” A membership with 18 million employees world wide. I can see why unionization is a threat to their $7.5 trillion market capitalization, less money for $1 million dollar office makeovers with $1200 waste baskets and golden commodes.
In her study Ms.Layne-Farrer uses mathematics that admittedly are beyond my education level, but a wise man (the late Robt. Heinlein) once said “if you torture numbers enough they can be made to say anything.” A study financed by an association of 260 of the largest corporation in the U.S. that says unions are bad– I’ll try to restrain my shock and awe.
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
7:39 pm
I was WAY too long-winded. I meant not so much “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”, as, “Pay no attention to what the Man’s been saying about the man behind Iron Curtain.”
“It’s the perceived threat of war that justifies facism, whether there exists a threat or not.” (W, 2002)
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Chris Broe
March 12th, 2009
7:43 pm
Kamchuk, nobody understood a word you wrote. Trust me on that one. Distill your comment into one 25-word sentence. I can.
Can U?
Communication itself is at stake. Try twittering. You are forced to be brief. They only allow 25 words or less. It’s the greatest thing to evolve from human communication. And guess what? I invented it.
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Kamchak
March 12th, 2009
8:08 pm
Chris Broe
While I feel the need to agree with you, your postings at 3:19,4:36,6:44 and 7:44 seem to exceed 25 words. Again someone telling me “don’t do as I do, do as I say do.” That sentiment doesn’t inspire trust.
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Jaye
March 13th, 2009
5:43 am
People can vent to the AJC and whine and moan, as if this really helps. Let your representatives hear from you and if they’ve made legislative decisions that adversely affect your life, vote them out of office next time you have the opportunity.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
5:44 am
Good morning all. Mr. Buffet’s celebrated comments are part of a rising chorus. Our allies in France and Germany flatly reject President Obama’s big-spending approach to resolving the financial distress. Certainly we all deplore unilateralists, who refuse to listen to our noble allies, and perhaps President Obama will have the good sense to initiate a sea change in his irrational economic programs.
The Empty Suit is not above making a false analogy. As noted by Taranto yesterday, opposition to “embryonic stem cell research” is not an issue of ideology, but one of ethics. An honest statement by Chauncey would have been that he favors science over ethics. But that would have reminded too many people of Dr. Josef Mengele, and the leap from Mengele’s misleaders to other tendencies in the Obama administration would have been uncomfortably easy.
Chuck Sims made one strategic error. You can add a tax if you eliminate a similar one. Georgia would support full sales tax on all sales if the income tax were abolished. The House also got it backwards on the new vehicle tax, which I oppose. A smarter course would have been to impose 7% with no limit, but with a “forgiveness” of the first $500 of tax on each title. That would shift the tax to the most conspicuous consumers, and exempt the most modest spenders, and mostly eliminate the $1 sale frauds.
I think the justices of the California Supreme Court have to stand for election. And there is a history of recalling incompetent justices. Sometimes even leftists are compelled to accept the plain language of constitutions.
On the Ford/Chevy divide, while my father was always a GM man, I am biased to Fords, largely due to an almost but not quite indestructible 1994 Ranger we used to teach our sons how to drive a stick. Except that we now drive a Subaru, a Honda, and an ancient Mazda.
Congressional Democrats are not constrained by the rules of normal people – they are our overlords.
Fulton County is run by democrats, too.
Hear, hear, on the probation companies. I’ve had a long-time dark fear, and I had no idea how to penetrate the murk to look for corruption. The recent Wilkes-Barre judge corruption inflamed my suspicions. Private companies providing public services need public accounting, to ensure there is no quid pro quo. Clay Cox sounds like a crook, except that overlords are exempt from normal standards. He follows the example of Chris Dodd.
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Ekim Eroom
March 13th, 2009
6:32 am
Larry Kudlow has a piece on NRO from yesterday that argues the nation may be moving out of the down cycle before a dime of stimulus money has been sent. What are the chances that the presses will be stopped and China will be given their money back? Hard to believe our “Old Europe” friends are more fiscally responsible than our current leaders. So called “conservative republicans” are as much to blame as democrats. Democrats cannot get to sixty without some GOP help.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:01 am
I’ve never been a Democrat, but I believed they’d earned their turn at the wheel after 8 years of the Dub-acle.
I’m sick of Congress in its entirety. Obama’s a better face man for our frat (Upsilon Sigma Alpha), but no miracle worker.
I’m not turning to the republicans, with their warloving Christian hypocrisies.
So where do we turn? Can Libertarians get it together?
Have pitchfork, will travel.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:13 am
Ragnar, did you refer to Europeans as “our noble allies” when they objected to our adventure in the big sandbox?
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Churchill's MOM
March 13th, 2009
7:20 am
Here’s 1 for Raghead..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxMInSfanqg
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Chris Broe
March 13th, 2009
7:22 am
CNN just reported that President Obama said yesterday that he would favor proposed legislation to ban future Octomoms if it would have prevented the Jonas Brothers.
The president did dance on “Ellen”, so his opinion is important.
Buffet declares an economic war! Another loose cannon! I cant see how that spin could lead us all into a slow slide into a Third World War, can you? If we can just get Americans to blame China, India, and the Phillipines, (the axis of payroll), then it will be easy to ignite a conflagration so vast and unstoppable that we’ll all know how Custer felt that fateful day on which he thought he could spin a victory out of unemployed liberals.
And that’s the best of the stories……good day!
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:26 am
Congress has intelligent members and dumb members. But the trait they all share is that they love to hear themselves talk.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:27 am
South Park absolutely SHREDDED the Jonas Brothers & Disney last night. Effing brilliant.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
7:30 am
Dear Sane Jane @ 7:13, I thought my joke was a pretty clever riff on that constant drumbeat the leftist loons pounded for eight years. Obviously not as clever as I thought if it flew past you. I should just leave humor to PoFo – futile for me to try.
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Why Bother
March 13th, 2009
7:32 am
It used to be fun defending Republicans and berating Democrats. I’ve lost my mojo. The system is so sick and corrupt that I consider 99% of politicians totally useless. We’d be better off using Tarot cards, OUIJA boards or pig entrails to make our laws. When/will it ever end? Will our corruption eventually cause our demise?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
7:32 am
Dear Mom @ 7:20, thanks, but IT here has youtube blocked, to prevent idle surfing by my lesser-motivated associates. Will review tonight.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:33 am
Insisting that embryonic stem cell research is solely a matter of ethics (and not science) is, in itself, a false choice.
And just like poker, a false analogy beats a false choice. Everyone knows that.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:35 am
My bad, Rag. I must have a faulty snark detector, or I’m just unusually somber this morning.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:37 am
The YouTube was a collection of bloviating (D) congressmen. Maxine Waters, in particular, reminds me of one of those incompetent schoolboard members who demands excellence from faculty, administration, students… yet hasn’t the foggiest idea how to accomplish that.
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playthatfunkymusic whiteboy
March 13th, 2009
7:39 am
Mission accomplished Mr. Wooten – putting forth positions on a (sometimes) daily basis that are so blatently partisan; it can’t help but create fervor enough to respond.
Ford vs. Chevy – give me a break. I refuse to buy another American car for the rest of my natural life, and I don’t feel guilty because the foreign car companies employ lots of Americans, get their supplies from American small businesses, and seem to be better corporate citizens all the way around than their US counterparts in Detroit. I have a 10 year old Japanese luxury SUV that has 180,000 miles on it, never a problem. I’ve owned 4 Fords and 2 Chevy’s in my lifetime and once that odometer hit 50,000 you might as well sell it to Carmax.
Clay Cox must not have paid proper homage to Skin Edge, Matt Towery, and “Sonny-Do” and the rest of the Georgia Republican Cabal.
Wooten have Skin and Matt told you who to start pumping for Governor yet? Please, if they say Glenn Richardson, look deep into the mirror, you just can’t do that to the citizens of this great state.
And Ragnar, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to point out that France and Germany don’t have the $$$ to pull off an economic stimulus on the magnitude the US is, plus they haven’t been as exposed to the banking crisis over mortgage securitization because frankly their banks have much tighter regulations. Old Europe has a much larger problem at hand, they need a different type of “stimulation” since their population levels are falling and aging.
Thanks all for the entertainment.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:40 am
I agree with Why Bother. I like to think that if the Founding Fathers came back today, they’d be wondering why we hadn’t thrown all the effing bass turds out yet & tried a second republic. What number is France on again?
Say what you want about the frogs, but they know how to put heads on pikes, my friend.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
7:43 am
If anybody anticipates a long, boring weekend with the prospective rain, urge you to pick up a copy of today’s WSJ. Took me two hours to read today. There must be 20 worthy essays therein, unusually interesting issue even by WSJ standards. Especially recommend the review of “Me Cheeta” and Rob Long’s amusing recommendations to The Empty Suit on gift-giving, “The President’s Diplomatic Gifts.”
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
7:45 am
Dear Funky @ 7:39, re France and Germany, the Europeans socialists are a futile decade ahead of The Empty Suit, so I take their cautionary as a sort of buyer’s remorse, much as Obama voters are beginning to feel.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:46 am
Not all of Europe’s population is aging & falling. Some parts are getting younger, browner & more likely to face east five times a day.
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Time for an overhaul
March 13th, 2009
7:46 am
Sane Jane, Rag,
You are so right!! I’ve been saying it’s time for a serious tea party. The insanity has got to stop, the lunatics are running the House and the Senate and it is very scary! I don’t give a flying clam which party you’re affliated with – they have all lost touch with reality! Can we just start impeaching them all and start over!
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
7:47 am
Dear Jane @ 7:40, if you run against Johnny, remind me to send money to your campaign.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
7:48 am
Ragnar, have you ever read Bruce Bawer? Stealing Jesus, and While Europe Slept? Pretty ambidextrous.
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Time for an overhaul
March 13th, 2009
7:51 am
Sane Jane & Rag – now there’s a winning ticket.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
7:53 am
Just let me be Jane’s Atty Gen – we’ll straighten ‘em out. I’ll prosecute the crooks in Congress, so we’ll have 421 new members.
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Time for an overhaul
March 13th, 2009
7:53 am
Jane @7.48 – spot on!
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Your morning jolt. With video. | Political Insider
March 13th, 2009
7:53 am
[...] Some opinion: Jim Wooten on Chevys, Fords and clodhoppers. [...]
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
8:02 am
Anybody who sees fault principally on one side or the other (doesn’t matter, D or R) is part of the problem.
We get the government we deserve, because we delight in dumbing down issues into truthy-sounding bytes.
Colbert was officially a genius with “truthiness.” It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it just needs to sound good.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
8:03 am
Thanks y’all, but I can’t run for anything till my “medication” is decriminalized…
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
8:10 am
Our elected leaders should be required to endure “Question Time” with the day’s best political comedians: Maher, Miller, Stewart, etc. Let them be part of the vetting process to weed out the know-nothings.
Such a sad commentary on the state of our society when we need the court jesters to bail us out.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:12 am
In pleading guilty Thursday to running Wall Street’s biggest and
longest fraud, Bernard L. Madoff admitted his guilt for the first time
in public, and apologized to his victims.
But his testimony was also shaped by his determination to shield his
wife and family.
As a result, those who thought his guilty plea would shed more light on
the Ponzi scheme left the courtroom unsatisfied and uncertain — about
where their money had gone and who may have helped Mr. Madoff steal it.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:13 am
Swiss private bank Union Bancaire Privee, one of the largest European
hedge-fund investors, offered Thursday to buy back $700 million of its
clients’ Madoff-related investments at half what they originally paid.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:14 am
An accountant working with some Madoff victims argues that the United
States government, which collected tax for years on phantom gains, was
the “single biggest beneficiary” of the scheme.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:19 am
Under pressure from the government, Citigroup is considering several
candidates with financial expertise to join its embattled board,
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playthatfunkymusic whiteboy
March 13th, 2009
8:21 am
Ragnar, I believe you would have referred to JFK also as an “empty suit”. Hmmmm, well maybe an empty suit is what we need after 8 years of an “empty head”. Actually, give me 8 years of a fiscally conservative, progressive Southern Democratic Governor, paired with an ideological yet intelligent Republican Congress – America did amazing things from 1992-2000. Under that combination, we defeated communism totally (through our economy)and spread freedom, effectively ended a genocide in Bosnia with a multi-pronged approach (diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, relief, and cruise missles) defeated the welfare state (less than 0.1% of the population of Georgia received federal welfare assistance in 2005 – something folks that lived here in the 70’s and 80’s would have thought impossible), billion dollar budget surpluses, Georgia’s economy booming, New York making a magnificent comeback – the Falcons went to the SuperBowl (I’ll never forgive Eugine Robinson) and the Braves won a World Series.
By the way, world markets are up again today – come on Wooten and others, give me the good spin… come on lets hear it.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:22 am
A House committee has started investigating whether Merrill Lynch gave
Congress misleading information about its plans for executive bonuses.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:24 am
Berkshire Hathaway was stripped of its ‘AAA’ credit rating by Fitch
Ratings, which cited concerns about Berkshire’s equity and derivatives
investments, as well as Warren E. Buffett’s tight grip on the company.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:26 am
Federal lawmakers pressured the top U.S. accounting rulemaker for new
guidance on mark-to-market accounting within three weeks or face
legislation to change the rule that has forced banks to record billions
of dollars in asset write-downs.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:27 am
General Electric and its finance arm lost their coveted triple-A credit
rating from Standard & Poor’s on Thursday, as the credit-rating agency
downgraded G.E.’s long-term debt one notch. But G.E. shares rose amid
relief the cut wasn’t worse.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:30 am
Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California, helped set up a
meeting in which the chief executive of OneUnited, a bank with
financial ties to her family, asked for special bailout funds, Treasury
officials said.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 13th, 2009
8:32 am
Trouble continued to grow in the yellow pages publishing sector, as
R.H. Donnelley hired Lazard to restructure its debt and Idearc
acknowledged that it may seek a prenegotiated bankruptcy.
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sane jane
March 13th, 2009
8:44 am
Thank you for killing the conversation, Big Bucks GOP.
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Maniac is accurate
March 13th, 2009
8:44 am
I can’t drive my F-350 dually with the 7.3-liter turbo diesel for more than four hours, because I run the risk of suffering priopism.
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MacArthur O. Means
March 13th, 2009
8:47 am
Ragnar Danncuckhold, you sell yourself short. Your schtick is often quite funny.
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REPUBLICANS EVIL TIMEISUP
March 13th, 2009
8:49 am
JUST LIKE JIMBO AND HIS OLD REDNECK CREW WHO DONT WANT TO PAY AMERICANS THEIR FARE SHARE,WHO WOULD LIKE TO GET RID OF THE UNIONS SO THAT THE GREEDY CEOS CAN SLAVE AMERICANS AT LOW WAGES.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE LIKE SUXBY PERDONT JOHNNY BOY PHIL GIMMY ARE ABOUT,THEY USE THE SOUTHERN IGNORANCE TO KEEP THE GOOD OLE BOYS AND GIRLS BROKE STUPID AND BLIND.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
8:53 am
Dear funky @ 8:21, I think any suggestion of similarity between Obama and JFK would be the triumph of hope over experience. While JFK had many flaws, both personal and in policy, we have to remember that single shining legacy, the JFK tax cuts. Clearly JFK understood (better than most contemporary democrats) the elements of job formation.
Obama has time yet to pull out of this suicide dive he has designed for the US economy. Everything he says sounds more like “higher costs for business” and “more restrictions for business.” Not very much hope for redemption there. To your point, however, think how much better the country would perform with President Phil Bredesen than with the current Empty Suit.
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Maniac is accurate
March 13th, 2009
8:54 am
There are many here much smarter than me. What will it take to bring renewable energies to mass market? That industry now is dominated by hundreds of small companies that consist of labs and small test sites. What is the catalyst to get these technologies off the drawing boards and into the marketplace?
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
9:06 am
Dear Funky @ 8:21, your post prompts a couple of other observations. How were JFK and the Horndog different from President Jimmy (other than the obvious sex jokes – I’m comparatively serious here)? JFK worked to eliminate the socialist effect of segregation, thus freeing the economy to perform on merit alone. The Horndog gets credit from me for pushing NAFTA, which also freed the economy to perform. Each had a significant “freedom” initiative for the economy.
In contrast, President Carter was a “regulator” slapping government shackles on the economy right and left. In all fairness, Jimmy inherited Nixon’s disastrously-foolish wage and price controls – Jimmy’s great sin was failure to remove the shackles, thus allowing Reagan credit for that bit of genius. We can credit Jimmy with eliminating some few long-standing pricing restrictions – airlines, banking, trucking – but those were minor compared to his greatest omission, oil. Gas lines, coupled with the inflation that accelerated with his “social” spending, destroyed his presidency. Unfortunately President Obama shows no evidence of a capacity to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors.
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playthatfunkymusic whiteboy
March 13th, 2009
9:08 am
Maniac (love the name), it all boils down to one thing – money. It has to be worth it. Energy pricing (oil, gas, etc.) have to get to such a level that renewables have to make economic sense to invest in. Two ways to accomplish that – setting an artificial price floor, like for instance gas would have to be at least $2.50 a gallon. Not a fan of that, but I do see the proponents point. The other way is just to wait for the market to take care of it, which eventually it will have to – no matter how much people think is actually in the ground, everyone agrees that supplies are limited.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
9:12 am
Dear Maniac @ 8:54, What will it take to bring renewable energies to mass market? [The US has a long-standing blindness to the best renewable energy source ever discovered,](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html ) and widely exploited by other countries. If, however, you refer to some of the grossly inefficient pie-in-the-sky sources, you may have to repeal the laws of physics. Like that old comic that depicts a scientist standing before a blackboard filled with formulae, ending with “and then a miracle happens.”
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
9:16 am
Dear funky @ 9:08, I think I saw, not too long ago, a really odd but credible argument that oil renews itself. The physics were well beyond my competence, so I cannot represent the legitimacy of the discussion.
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zeke
March 13th, 2009
9:29 am
UNIONS ARE THE SOCIALIST SCOURGE OF A FREE SOCIETY! UNIONS ARE THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF THE BIG THREE ECONOMIC TROUBLE! THAT COUPLED WITH THE INSANE MANDATES PUT ON THEM BY OUR SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT WILL CONTINUE TO DEPLETE OUR ECONOMY! HOW IN THE WORLD DO YOU THINK THAT A BUNCH OF SCUMBAG LAWYERS IN CONGRESS CAN DETERMINE THE BEST CAR TO MAKE, THE BEST OPTIONS TO PUT ON THAT CAR AND HOW TO MAGICALLY MAKE THAT CAR EFFICIENT, LOW COST, LESS POLLUTING AND STILL SELL IT TO PEOPLE WHO DO NOT WANT IT! STUPID POLITICOS WILL RUIN US COMPLETELY! THE BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION IS TO BAN ALL UNIONS BY CONSTITUTIONAL AMMENDMENT!
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playthatfunkymusic whiteboy
March 13th, 2009
9:33 am
Ragnar, good observations and I accept the criticism of Carter on the oil point, mainly because you unlike many others relent that Jimmy was dealt a horrible hand when he took over.
I would contend however, that with one utterance at the beginning of his presidency, I believe we may have the right person for the moment in the White House. When the Daschle fiasco unfolded, President Obama did something that neither President Bush nor President Clinton did, which was admit that he was wrong and took personal responsibility. Unfortunately too many leaders in all enterprises see that as a sign of weakness, whereas the people following them see it as a very positive thing.
This President has also tried to surround himself with the best people and take in differing viewpoints. I have yet to see a “Brown-y” on this administrations staff (could be there, but I haven’t seen it yet). However, unfortunately though some picks have been qualified, they have personal issues that basically make them unfit – although I think it’s humorous the same people railing against the arcane “tax-code” and all of it’s intracacies are the very same people demanding Obama’s appointments that made tax mistakes step aside.
I am of the mind we do not need an idealogue or a demagogue in the White House at this critical juncture.
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cranky old man
March 13th, 2009
9:53 am
@Temp,
“The reduction in wages is simple economics. You have a large increase in available workers due to more women working, without a corresponding increase in the number of jobs. “
“As for off shoring, there is nothing sacred or special about the American worker. Why does a worker in India or China or the Philippines not have the same right to a job that you do? They work just as hard, have the same level of education and charge 1/3 the price. Why would I not offshore? Just as companies have to compete in the global economy, so do workers.”
Well, here are a few problems I see with that:
1. Businesses are off-shoring, in part, to avoid having to obey safety and environmental regulations. Even if such laws exist in the countries to which they export the jobs, they are often not enforced, either as a deliberate policy to lure businesses, or as a result of bribery. Pollution, left unchecked, will eventually affect the entire planet.
2. This practice does at least as much harm as good for most of the people living in the countries to which the factories are re-located. Yes, I am aware that most Third World subsistence farmers would gladly take a job in a sweatshop working 12 hours per day with no break for $1.25 per hour, because it’s still better than subsistence farming. But, as soon as the local economy starts to improve enough that the workers realize what they are missing and start agitating for better wages, the businesses re-locate yet again to the next untapped market of cheap labor, leaving the locals out of work, and now without their farms to go back to.
2. These businesses have been built using the resources of the United States, much of it funded with our tax dollars. Every business benefits from roads, bridges, canals, ports, law enforcement, fire departments, etc. The workforce that built these businesses was educated in public schools. The founder and the executives may have gone to college on the GI Bill. And now, having taken what they can from our society, the businesses abandon their responsibilities to benefit a few fat cats at the top, leaving the workers who built the businesses unemployed and local economies devastated.
3. Something else I’ve noticed is that free trade fanatics seem to think it’s perfectly reasonable for businesses to take advantage of the difference in the cost of living to hire cheap labor. But, apparently, it’s not okay for consumers to take advantage of these same differences. Remember a year or two ago when there was such a stink about people getting drugs (the legal kind) from Canada because they were cheaper? Oh, no, we can’t have that. American consumers are our captive cash cows. Another example is DVDs. I found this out when my sister (who lives in Europe) sent my wife a DVD collection. The DVDs won’t play on an American DVD player. So we watched some of them on my laptop. But guess what? There is a limit to the number of times the software is allowed to switch back and forth between US and European compatible DVD formatting. And I’m not talking about anti-piracy software. These were legally purchased DVDs. But, the thing is, due to the difference in the cost of living around the world, movie distributors who charge $20 in the US can only charge, say $4 in Indonesia. So we have to prevent some industrious Indonesian entrepreneur from buying legal copies and shipping them back to the US to sell for $10 each.
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Ga Values
March 13th, 2009
10:08 am
“Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California”, isn’t she the 1 who said the CIA was selling drugs to blacks to fund a secrete war in central America? We have some real nut cases in congress including ours, on the bright side she was helping her husband not Saxby’s Lobbyist Son.
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
10:44 am
P’whiteboy @9:33
No, we don’t have a idealogue or a demagogue in the White House. We have a Chicago community organizer with a gift of charismatic gab attached permanently to a teleprompter.
Obama had no need to apologize for Tom Daschle. Daschle was the one who did not pay his taxes, not Obama. But it did sound so sincere for Obama to say “I’m responsible!”. All his sycophants, like you, immediately said “How sweet!”
You said that the President surrounds himself with “the best people”. Last night Lehrer News Hour interviewed the new US Education Secretary. His credentials: he played basketball with Obama, “transformed” CHICAGO schools BUT their ratings never rose. The new Secretary did say he liked Bush’s education policies. Maybe he won’t be a “Brownie”. He definitely will be an “Obamie”.
Americans do not want their taxes raised. They also want officials to pay their taxes just like all citizens are required to pay. Obama’s tax policies have changed, reduced, raised, qualified, explained, unknown, and become questionable. Americans are queasy. They know they are about to be DRAINED. Not by Madoff but by Obama. He has skipped over many of his promises already. Another one would not be surprising.
Americans have little confidence in Washington these days. When the big celebration was over, the fairy tale was not reality. It is not a pretty sight.
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Maniac is accurate
March 13th, 2009
10:51 am
Thanks. Funky and Ragnar, I refer to wind (both big and small), non-food source ethanol and biodiesel, electricity from solar (beyond just solar panels on the roof), tides, etc. It seems like many of these technologies are “this close,” to being mass marketable, but are stuck at first base. I can’t wrap my mind around how capturing energy from nature hasn’t really made the leap from lab to Main Street by now.
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Ga Values
March 13th, 2009
10:55 am
John & stewart & Cramer on the comedy channel real must see TV. Most of this is over my wife’s head but I like her to watch CNBC more than Fox.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
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@@
March 13th, 2009
10:57 am
Jim, I found myself lost in the tubes with no time to go searching. Nice to find your thoughts up and running. ‘Twas Charles in Charge, trolling the bridge who pointed me in the right direction and to him I say, THANK YOU CHARLES! I can only take so much of Bookman, The Left-Handed Super Nanny’s admonitions.
To Warren Buffett I would say “AMEN!” Obama putting the empty cart before the donkeys will leave us stranded on the road to RECOVERY. I’ve said before that Obama’s timing sucks. In the instance of his spending policies, I’m not so sure it isn’t intentional. I think he suffers from a head Rush off at the pass. He’s a One-Uppity kinda guy. No matter whether I use the word “arrogant”…..”peremptory”…..”cocky”, they’ll still read it as “uppity”. To them I say “UPPITY THEIRS”. HE is what HE is and you love it.
His administration must have assumed <a href=”http://www.patriotpost.us/opinion/charles-krauthammer/2009/03/13/using-embryos-without-limit.html” the guy in the wheelchair would be so flattered by the invitation, that he could be duped into believing that “Using Embryos … Without Limit?” was a good thing?
—”Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned — and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived — human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.”—
I challenged a guy over at Bookman’s to speculate as to the unintended consequences of expanding on embryonic stem cell research. Silence….couldn’t wrap his tiny brain around such huge consequences, I guess.
THANK YOU CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER!!! RAMP IT UP!
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@@
March 13th, 2009
10:59 am
Oops! Let me fix that link before I go…
“Using Embryos…..Without Limit?”
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
11:01 am
Dear Maniac,
Scientists have not made it practical. Warming up in the sun was known by cave men. Don Quixote and Dutchmen knew about wind power. Sailors as far back as the Vikings knew about the tides. Livestock knew about the green grass. Making it work for millions requires billions and even Al Gore could not invent that much. Give’em time. They will get blood from a turnip and energy from soda pop. I love scientists. My family is full of ‘em.
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Ga Values
March 13th, 2009
11:04 am
“If mark-to-market accounting is to blame for the current financial crisis, then the National Weather Service is to blame for Hurricane Katrina; if it hadn’t told us the hurricane hit New Orleans, the city would never have flooded.” Opening lines from an excellent assesment of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, hope Ranger can get at this..
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/business/economy/13norris.html?_r=1&hp
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
11:23 am
Dear GA Values, good afternoon. Perhaps you misperceive – mark to market is not “to blame” for the financial crisis, it merely exacerbates the problem. CRA is “to blame.” “Mark to market” merely makes it worse, by compelling banks to reflect a zero value for assets with real income production. The silly mis-accounting rule incorrectly reflects banks as insolvent, and the incorrect reflection compels (by law) mindless bureaucrats to close the banks. One government lunacy feeding another, feeding another.
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One Voice
March 13th, 2009
11:25 am
Maybe if Jim had spent his early years expanding his education instead of listening to Chevy-Ford debates he’d know the difference betweeen science and ideology. Hick.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
11:30 am
Dear One Voice @ 11:25, good afternoon. Perhaps if Obama had attended a real church he would know the difference between “ideology” and “ethics.”
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Peter
March 13th, 2009
11:37 am
Jim Please get on with your retirement…….
The facts have been for 8 years the Republican’s have lied to America and the world about Science. They were in charge when the economy went to heck in a hand basket, and now they don’t want to be team players….and they hope America gets worse not better.
Are Republican’s really American ?
“President Obama is the front man radicals have long needed”….this stupid comment says all…….after having a Republican President make up a WAR, and Bankrupted America, Jim makes this statement.
I guess making up a WAR is Not Radical in Jim’s mind….. he likes all the Killing and wasteful spending.
Gee 8 years of Republican’s bilking America, and Jim wants all problems fixed in a few months !
I do feel Congress, and the House should not get a Pay Raise, but should take a 10% pay deduction for all they have done over the last 8 years, basically nothing.
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Ga Values
March 13th, 2009
11:41 am
Ragnar Danneskjöld 11:23 am
So you would buy a stock that overstated their asset values?
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Churchill's MOM
March 13th, 2009
11:42 am
Jim, Why is Bob Barr & Bookman on the home page and you are not?
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Chris Matthews' Tingling Leg
March 13th, 2009
11:56 am
Anyone noticed how Obama’s opinion poll is dropping like a lead balloon? Anyone noticed that 41% this nation now believes that Algore’s global warming scam is just overhyped junk science (according to Gallup – and that’s up from 31% in 2002) ? Anyone noticed that leading economists have given Obama & Geithner (the tax cheat) a big fat **F** for handling the economic situation? Anyone noticed the hypocrisy of Nanny Pelosi (Ms. Drain The Swamp herself) and flying around on USAF aircraft on a whim’s notice? Anyone notice that when Obama has a speech before the media he turns his head constantly from left to right while talking into each teleprompter to make it appear that he is actually speaking from memory and actually talking to the audience? Anyone notice that Obama will not attend this year’s Annual Gridiron Dinner next Saturday, March 21st, and will be the first president since Grover Cleveland not to attend the first Gridiron Club Dinner of his presidency? Anyone notice that left wing Jon Stewart get his panties in a wad over CNBC’s Cramer slamming the Democrats (very deservedly btw)? Anyone notice Obama’s comment that the national crisis is “not as bad as we think”? Finally, has anyone noticed the main stream liberal DNC media IGNORING just about all of the above? In a year Obama will have outspent Bush in eight years, INCLUDING Iraq. Now which one of you mindless hysterical liberal sheilas are going to come out of the powder room and start whining about “hate & anger speech” in retort to this? Please, don’t let us down, moonbats.
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Peter
March 13th, 2009
11:59 am
Hey…..Chris Matthews’ Tingling Leg……… More Republican lies……
“In a year Obama will have outspent Bush in eight years, INCLUDING Iraq.”
It will be 3 Trillion for the WAR alone….
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Time for an overhaul
March 13th, 2009
12:03 pm
World markets are up because some good news from Ford who is doing what they need to have been doing all along to show they might have a clue how to lead themselves out of the woods, without a government handout. News of the huge drug company merger brought some more good news to the market.
The little uptick in the market doesn’t have anything to do with the Prez or the House. Most people I know and work with are just not that confident in what Obama, Vice President Pelosi and company are doing and believe less of what they are saying!
In fact, many are laminting that if McCain had been the McCain we’re seeing right now the outcome might have been different! The American people are not on board with being taxed to death to supplement bad business models, greed and more pork. The passing of this recent bill with all the same old “ear marked” pork that Obama promised to eliminate. It didn’t take long to break that promise!
I’m with you Jane and Rag, the biggest problem we still have in this country is the partisanship. People have got to stop laying on the tracks and dying for a damn party. Both parties as an entity have huge faults and both parties are completely out of touch with reality and the people!!
More people need to vote across party lines for the BEST PERSON FOR THE JOB, period. Forget the stupid PARTY. It needs to cease being either Dem or Repub and just be a government that actually represents the people. Not the special interests who feathered the campaign nest and to whom they are then indebted.
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Logic.htcb
March 13th, 2009
12:07 pm
PrezO will have americans gushing blood when they realize there are fewer millionaires to tax due to the econ crisis. Can’t get blood out of a turnip for the rootabeggars.
The Dow was down at opening.
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Logic.htcb
March 13th, 2009
12:11 pm
Firing blanks
YES HE IS!
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Time for an overhaul
March 13th, 2009
12:16 pm
In fact, each candidate should only be allowed to spend say $2 mil on their campaign, period. Where the money comes from must be made public each time a donation is made and no more than $2 mil, period.
This approach would certainly put a lid on the contributions that lead to favors. It would also eliminate a lot of the media circus, because you’d blow through your budget in no time advertising on cable! Get out there and really mingle with the people in town halls, you might just learn something about what they people want and need.
Our Government should not be made up of movie star, rock star glitz, but that’s what happens with the mega-millions being spent on campaigns. We get a lot of hype and bias from the media outlets and unfortunately that’s how most people make their selection. He who gets the most airplay, wins.
Our government needs a serious reality check and so do we. As another poster put it, we elected them. If we are not pleased with what they are doing, then we need to let them know and let them know often and loudly enough to be heard, if they continue to NOT listen, then lets get out of there, quickly.
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Roadblock
March 13th, 2009
12:25 pm
CORRECTED – US STOCKS-Wall street slides as banks fade, tech weighs
There’s nothing comprehensive about the boxed set, obama and geithner.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
1:13 pm
Dear GA Values @ 11:41, I don’t know anyone who looks at asset value when buying a stock. Most of us look at income and growth potential. The only people who care about a bank’s asset values are the FDIC and the chartering authority.
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"Charles", The Original
March 13th, 2009
1:30 pm
Most haunting quote of the week, from Geneva County, Ala., Deputy Sheriff Josh Myers, whose wife and daughter were among those killed in a shooting rampage a day earlier: “I cried so much yesterday, I don’t have a tear left in me” writes Jim Wooten.
It’s almost impossible to discuss an otherworldly topic if people have only worldly experiences. I thank God for the privilege of being allowed to know both. It was Brian Gene Nichols, the Fulton County Courthouse shooter, who attempted to discuss the otherworldly with psychologist, investigators, and prosecutors; but his efforts were all for naught. Nichols said that he was not responsible for assaulting five people, severely beating a deputy to the point of permanent brain damage, and executing four people. But it was the demon that possessed his body. Now practically everybody thought Nichols’ confession to be a ploy to avoid the death penalty. It’s via experience alone that anyone can appreciate Nichols’ confession.
The word is that Michael McLendon, the Alabama rampage shooter was somewhat depressed about job issues, but the available information doesn’t specify that his motive was job-related. And even if the motive was specified as job-related, they would be sadly mistaken. Similar to the courthouse shooting in Atlanta, most people in Alabama don’t know what motivated Michael McLendon to kill ten people.
I have sympathy for Deputy Sheriff Josh Myers during his time of tribulation. If Myers is a Christian, he should take the time to pray. Oh people of God what needless pain we bear. And it’s all because we don’t carry everything to God in prayer. If Myers isn’t a Christian, he should seriously consider becoming one because the days are evil. But the good news is greater is Jesus that’s in Christians, than the devil that is in the people that love the world and all that it has to offer.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
2:04 pm
Excellent post “Charles”, The Original! When I read Jim’s last paragraph, I thought how easy it would be for Deputy Sheriff Myers to lose his compassion but it can always be re-discovered in God’s love for him.
Thank you for that post.
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
2:31 pm
Some thoughts about the California Supreme Court’s adjudication of that state’s Proposition 8, banning gay marriage. To my gay friends: I counsel patience. Cold comfort, I’m sure, but the very best I can do.
This mess is largely the making of one man, California’s Chief Justice Ron George, who almost single-handedly foiled repeated attempts by voters to set it straight (as it were) that government, if it is to recognize marriage at all, should recognize only the matrimony of one woman with one man. Believe me, the fix was in from the start, and Mr. Justice George was Chief Fixer. When Judge George says that “maybe the solution has to be a political one”, what he’s really saying is that he’s come to realize that he must flip-flop on this one, and side with the masses this time instead of, as before, with elite politicians sympathetic to gay rights. He’s an exceedingly political jurist, ever with his finger in the breeze.
I predict that the decision will go 5-2 or even 6-1 to support the ban, and that’s just the way it goes with pragmatist jurists who can read the writing on the wall. I’ve never considered Justice George a principled person, only an ambitious one.
Not so, Associate Justice Kennard. I suspect she regards this thorny mess much as I do: as a thicket of Ron George’s making. She will, I’m sure, write the opinion for the Majority. Regardless of whether you agree with her forthcoming opinion, I consider her a jurist of the utmost conscientiousness and fairness. She is a true lady of the Bench.
Now, going forward. As I say, patience. There is geologic time, there is historical time, and there is anthropological time. These things take time, and they don’t turn on a dime.
I once was thrust, as Legislative Director to the Chair of the first state judiciary committee to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, into the midst of this divisive, rather tragic issue. To say nothing of incessant phone calls, leters and emails, I was besieged daily with delegations of persons, mainly clerics, who argued passionately both sides of the issue. As well as anyone I’m aware of how deeply held are the beliefs of both sides.
All along I’ve argued that the sensible thing is to take government “out of the marriage business” by limiting government’s role to that of certifier of civil unions, in recognition of the contractual duties and privileges attaching to couples willing to commit themselves wholly to each other’s welfare. That would leave it to religious institutions to sanction “marriage” itself, and if Catholics and mainline Proddies want to limit the sacrament to heterosexual coupling, then so be it; let gay couples find a sympathetic Unitarian church or Reform synagogue, etc.
Of course, this is a pragmatic approach to jurisprudence, but then Mr. Justice Holmes was the first Pragmatist judge, and he was a smart cookie. I bet on Judge Kennard, not Judge George, to inherit the Holmesian mantle here, and to open the door to landmark legislation that will restrain government from indulging in religious affairs while leaving it up to faith-based institutions to decide what to do with the coveted title of marriage.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
2:31 pm
Not part of Jim’s Free-for-All but disconcerting given Obama’s troop surge into Afghanistan.
I knew Nawaz Sharif would spell more trouble down the road in Pakistan.
—Major demonstrations shaping up in Pakistan could lead to clashes between the ruling Pakistan People’s Party and the opposition led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and its lawyer allies. With the economy weakened by the financial crisis, and with Islamist insurgencies raging inside Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan, the Pakistani military will have a difficult time stabilizing the situation, especially on its own.—
Hmmmmm…can’t do it on its own, eh?
—It is unclear whether intense 11th-hour efforts will prevent a showdown between the government and the opposition. If the efforts fail, then the result will likely be continuing demonstrations and clashes in the streets between protesters and security forces, which would force the military to step in and try to reboot the system with a new government, possibly some form of civil-military hybrid.—
Just Do It!
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@@
March 13th, 2009
2:58 pm
Pakistan’s president is, today, offering concessions — power sharing. Sharif, long time friend and associate of Osama Bin Laden, offered this response:
—Sharif denies he has latched on to the protests as a way to gain personal power or bring down the government, insisting he wants to strengthen Pakistani democracy. However, in an interview with a local TV channel, he warned that by holding out on the judges, Zardari may have to exit his term early.—
—”I don’t think he will be able to complete his five years,” said Sharif, a former prime minister.—
—Aside from black-suited lawyers, the call for an independent judiciary has drawn together some unlikely bedfellows, including human rights activists, leftists wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and Islamist party activists seeking to benefit from any new political order.—
Would you look at ^^^ that! Obama supporters’ beloved Che is all the rage in Pakistan.
Tres chic!
Glenn:
I thought California has, for some time, offered legal rights to gay couples through the Domestic Partnership Law. The majority of Americans are in favor of civil unions. Gay couples are making this a lot harder than it needs to be.
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One Voice
March 13th, 2009
3:02 pm
Ayn Rand @ 11:30,
No one who is religious has an understanding of ethics. Religious people indoctrinate others into believing “truths” about things that they do not really know to be true. If you tell someone that something is true but have no evidence to support that proposition, you are lying. To do such a thing would be unethical, so all “believers” who attempt to spread their faith are therefore unethical. But you model yourself after one of the famous intellectual lightweights of the 20th century, so I would expect you to have trouble with logic and have actually seen your challenges with it in writing.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
3:05 pm
Jim, these disappearing and reappearing posts are a problem in this new format.
I’m not all that computer savvy but, DANG!……is it that difficult to correct the problem or are we/I being admonished like at Jay Bookman, Super Nanny’s blog?
I left Glenn a question and I WILL NOT ask it again?
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@@
March 13th, 2009
3:07 pm
Never mind, Jim. It reappeared or never appeared. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
3:18 pm
Dear One @ 3:02, no one who calls himself one voice can have an understanding of logic. One voice people present epithets as logic, attempting to make people believe name calling is “argument.” If you tell someone your epithets are logic. but have no basis for the commentary, you are a doofus. Lighten up, Nazi! I simply made a joke about Obama, riffing off your mindless name calling. Your lockstep true believers in The One are a threat to society.
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
3:20 pm
Yes, @@, that’s quite true. But it goes back to the Brown decision: “’seperate but equal’ is inherently unequal.” No one on the CA Sup. Ct., as best I can tell, underestimates the damage done by the fey withholding from homosexuals of the state’s acknowledgement of actual marriage. The situation as it stands is made the more poignant when one is faced with the fact of so many homosexual couples there, especially lesbian couples, striving as valiantly as anyone to rear children as best they can.
The status quo in California is tantamount to what jurisprudentialists call a “feat of nomenclature”, and so the Consitututional principle of Equal Protection rears its head. That, in a nutshell, is the issue before the Court.
It truly is much the same as the seggregation issue that confronted the U.S. Supremes in the 1950s. As I said, a thorny thicket. A mess.
I agree with your implication that gay-friendly lawyers have made the mess, but then many of those lawyers have been judges, in train with well placed legislators. Our home state’s highest court now finds itself, once again, in the position of having to untie those knots which it, itself, tied in the first place. Just as it once had been, for the entire nation, with deseggregation.
As I put it about five years ago, “a bloody Solomonic mess”.
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
3:23 pm
Ragnar, what do you make of this Prop 8 problem?
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
3:30 pm
I know, @@, waswiddat? Posts appear, disappear, reappear seemingly at random. Makes it hard to sustain a blog, don’ it?
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
3:35 pm
Excuse me, please, @@. “Separate”, not “seperate”.
Oh, heavens.
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
3:42 pm
Dear Jim Wooten,
As the day wears on, I thought about your Chevy-Ford discussions. What fun to look back and remember times when discussions were personalities in projection and faults were foibles. Who had the greatest truck that unquestionably ranked FIRST? Or who was the most persuasive? (Or who could tell the biggest lie??)
To tell the truth, I even had a older family member who loved his Dodge. Had to get a new one every year, always a silver one. He racked up more miles than most country doctors making house calls. And he made every trip in his Dodge.
No Dodges at my house. But discussion prevails. I am a Chevy person, the blueblood car of the nation. Not just a Caddie. A sweet little Cavalier which makes my menfolks snicker. I love it and defend its honor frequently.
So what do I hear? It is not great like a Honda. Toyota’s never wear out. Balderdash! Nothing beats my Chevy. No problems. Good mileage. I even get it shined up occasionally. AND it is AMERICAN MADE. A winner!!
So what do I hear? If they build a better car, I’ll buy American. Bah, hunbug!! I tell my family. Nothing beats American. You’ve been fooled!
But now I hear a somber drumbeat. A funeral dirge for the Chevy? Say it aint so. No no! My Cavalier may get tired and no way to get a new Chevy? That is like Popeye without spinach, Burger King without burgers, the colonel without chicken….I can’t face it.
Well, I may survive but the going will be tough. No Chevy? I may curl up in a corner…hmmmm…what’s the price of motorcycles these days??? Really? How about bicycles??
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
3:45 pm
Sorry, Glenn. I was just car dreaming. Carry on…
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@@
March 13th, 2009
3:48 pm
It does, indeed Glenn.
Another question for you….on the subject of gay adoptions…
I’ll preface it by saying that I believe committed gays are fully capable of offering a loving environment for children. Matter of fact, there’s a lesbian couple at my church who presently have three children from previous marriages (I’m assuming to men). They just had a baby. I’m not inclined to ask how. Here’s the question…
Since a small child (baby) has no voice, do you think it’s fair to throw them into a family dynamic that they may one day find uncomfortable? It’s a question I’ve struggled with for some time. You know me…..kids first!
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
3:50 pm
Dusty, like @@ I’m having trouble getting this new blog format to work. Are you too finding it glitchy?
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
3:58 pm
Glenn,
I have not posted many times today. When I did, it came right up on the screen.
I think several people posting at one time makes it seem disjointed. Everybody is not talking about the same subject. So a question and answer may have various subjects in between. I don’t know the cure for that. At this hour, maybe something to warm the cockles of your heart!
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Ga Values
March 13th, 2009
3:59 pm
Ragnar Danneskjöld 1:13 pm
Too bad you don’t understand Accounting, when you write off bad investments you reduce earnings, stocks sell for a multiple of earnings. I’ll try to write at your level.
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
4:02 pm
@@,
Yes, indeed: kids first. I guess I’d say, frankly, that gay adoption is better than foster care but not as desirable as a two-parent, heterosexual environment that is loving. The situation in California and in so many like-minded states is that that that train has left the station.
Since you raise the issue in an ecclesiastical context, allow me to remind you that the theme of surrogation saturates the biblical texts, both Hebrew and Greek. It’s therefore a question of ontology: who really is the true parent?
Some years ago a dear friend of mine in San Francisco, fresh from her indoctrination at an elite women’s college (Mills) and fresher still from a horrible jilting at the hands of a man she loved (the monologist Josh Cornbluth, may the Good Lord strike him dead), decided that a better option would be to become a lesbian separatist. She asked whether I’d join her other, remaining male friends in becoming a sperm donor, as she’d given up on men an marriage but not on her longstanding ambition to become a mother. “You don’t need a man to have a child”, was her rationale. (Her remark was so in sync with the zeitgeist that you probably can pinpoint the very year of the remark within a standard devation of 12 months!) My answer to her was, “Yes, that’s right: you don’t need a man to have a child; you need a man to father a child.”
Of course I never donated. Aside from my religious upbringing, the thought of the sticky magazines at a clinic in Noe Valley just somehow didn’t make it for me…
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
4:03 pm
Glenn,
See what I mean?
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@@
March 13th, 2009
4:25 pm
Merciful Percival! I hit refresh, and Jim’s site is splayed all over the place — plastic to plastic on my CRT. It wooks so BIG!
Glenn:
Thank you for your H…..U…..G…..E contribution.
I would also prefer it to foster care. Not to say there aren’t good foster parents out there but the motivation to be one and the desperation to find one can, all too often, result in a failure to thrive environment.
To be honest, it was when I encountered the exceptional three from the two exceptions that I began to say to myself….”Hey! You know what this could work.” The three are perfectly well-adjusted kids — the oldest being a 17 year old male. If they can come from a heterosexual family dynamic and adjust as well as they have to a gay family household, who am I to make the call?
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
4:25 pm
No, I don’t, Dusty. What do you mean?
The latest, rather funny, glitch at this end is that when I clicked on “Refresh”, the texts came out in a nearly illegible script font, rather than in this nice, new, clean sanserif.
Also, how are we supposed to set things in italics now, or in bold? Without those features, I fear I may regress to what PoFo once dubbed my UNABOMBER mode, just so’s I can place the emPHASis on the right SylLABle, as I unspool my prescriptions for the unDOing of those who, like Queen ElizaBETH and Henry KISSinger, would steal PARTS of our idENTities…
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
4:34 pm
@@,
You remind of Michael Palin’s hilarious riff, in “The Meaning of Life”, on the dotty don leading the English schoolboys in morning prayer: “Oh Merciful Gawd, you are so very BIG, so rully rully HUGE, gosh, we’re all teddibly impressed down here, I don’t have to tell you…”
As a product of Anglican schooling, I’m afraid I worried the movie-goers with my uncharacteristic and uncontrollable laughter at that parody.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
4:34 pm
Oh, and Glenn? A father figure can come in the form of a mentor. It’s the norm in our society where the absence of “dear old dad” is the norm. Big Brothers — Big Sisters. I love those commercials where the little guys are rolling their eyes at the prospects in essence saying “Well, he’s not perfect. Could use a little work, in fact. I’m just the kid for the job.”
I swear, Glenn, when you make comments like the one about the sticky mag, you “sound” to my eyes like PoliFore.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
4:37 pm
I’m so compressed.
Jim! What’s going on? Are you promoting “the family bed”.
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One Voice
March 13th, 2009
4:41 pm
Ayn Rand @ 3:18,
So an internet name tells you about someone’s ability to use logic? I suppose god told you that. No wonder you’re a “believer” with a thought process like that. What is particularly amusing is that you apparently don’t understand the moniker.
But the connection I made concerning your name is one you obviously intended, and your Ayn Rand nickname is clearly a representation of your ideology and a sign of low standards in literature and philosophy. But if you want to talk about logic I’d put my education and background as a researcher up against yours any day.
Do you know what we’d call someone who complained about name calling and then called someone a Nazi? A hypocrite. That would be you.
And you use the word lockstep a lot but apparently don’t understand its meaning. Lockstep would indicate someone who ignored evidence and instead conformed with the status quo of some underlying ideology at the expense of reason. Again, that would be you. In November you swore that McCain would win Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida and win the election. Why? Because that’s what you heard on Faux News, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary. Another example would be how you hold religious views (opinions) over the mountains of evidence for natural selection and the expansion of the universe. You see, when we look at the “data”, it is clear you are the one in lockstep, following the delusions of the uneducated, and unable to process evidence adequately. Cheers.
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
4:41 pm
Well, thanks I guess, @@, as he’s really a master stylist, whereas I was just trying to call it as I saw it — a far easier challenge.
I’m completely consonant with your empathy toward surrogation. One of my first posts ever — and by definition it was on this blog — objected to someone’s breezy assumption that “role models” need be of like and kind. That’s a silly assumption, as I’m sure you’ll agree. The writer Richard Rodriguez made this point, pointedly, about 25 years ago, and I knew Richard then and gave him a great slap on the back. It needed saying, that we take our mentors where we find them; or rather, if we’re lucky, they take us. Take us for a great ride.
Cowabunga!
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Kamchak
March 13th, 2009
4:45 pm
@ cranky old man
Thank you for a lucid, cogent argument that needed evey word that you used– proving that two and a half bumper stickers of twittering is insuffficient in a civilized conversation
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Glenn
March 13th, 2009
5:12 pm
And @@, I too love those commercials. They’re wonderful.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
5:41 pm
Glenn:
Would that be Robert Rodriguez the “apologetic” chicano?
I never would have thought of THAT Rodriquez.
“See” ‘ya later Glenn.
.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
5:44 pm
Sorry Richard.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
5:48 pm
Dear Glenn @ 3:23, I share Elton John’s view. If one has “domestic contracts,” one has all the rights of marriage without the name. Why inflame traditionalists for the sake of their symbolism? For the proponents of Prop 8, this is an “our traditions” issue, and for the opponents it is an “in your face” issue. Going beyond the symbolism – which drives both sides – there is a more substantial issue that is harder for me to reconcile. Health care. This is all about AIDs, at bottom line.
The “limit the definition of marriage” people are horrified that THEY are expected to cover the horrific costs of those who engaged in deviant behavior. The “marriage is between two breathing entities” crowd, however, has a legitimate argument, that the core purpose of health insurance was to spread the costs among as wide a field as possible, and that ex post facto limiting the scope for an unknowable risk is itself vicious if not perverse. There is legitimacy in both views. If we had a state AIDs pool, the passions on both sides of the marriage issue would calm instantly.
Dear GA Values @ 3:59, too bad you don’t understand the original purpose of accounting, which was to reflect values honestly. “If there is no market for the asset, its value is zero even if it throws off 6% of par value” is out of touch with reality.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 13th, 2009
5:52 pm
Dear One Voice @ 4:41, no actually I assumed someone chose your lockstep name for you. Your “logic” has a great inherent humor.
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@@
March 13th, 2009
6:33 pm
Say it ain’t so, Jim! On the AJC homepage, listed in the opinion section, there’s Luckovich, Bookman and BOB BARR?????
He can’t be that he’s the new “conservative” writer, can it?
Please say NO!!!!
please, please, please, Jim.
No?
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@@
March 13th, 2009
6:34 pm
Make that He an “It”.
I’m beside myself, simply.
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Dusty
March 13th, 2009
8:06 pm
@@,
Bookman just put in a comment on his blog that Bob Barr was NOT the new conservative columnist. Seems Barr is just starting up again where he left off at election time. That “not” makes both of us feel better.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 13th, 2009
8:40 pm
My comment: “In a year Obama will have outspent Bush in eight years, INCLUDING Iraq.”
Libtard Peter’s retort: “It will be 3 Trillion for the WAR alone….”
(the fact that the libtard didn’t refute anything else I posted is duly noted btw).
Peter the libtard needs to read up on some facts and not rely on the New York Slimes and PMSNBC for his “Facts”. My advice to you, moonbat, is to lay off the sauce of liberal DNC media claptrap.
Here’s how the Washington ComPost explains it:
“By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz”
“Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page B01″
“There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can’t spend $3 trillion — yes, $3 trillion — on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.”
“The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly — surpassed only by World War II.”
“Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month — $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.”
So the DNC media libtards are speculating, not FACT finding JUST like our friend “Peter.” Oh the humanity! Let’s see what the Iraq war is REALLY costing, shall we? Straight from the CBO in FY dollars:
2003: $0
2004: $75.9B
2005: $85.5B
2006: $101.7B
2007: $133.6B
2008: $153.5B
2009: $54.1B (bridge to date)
For the libtards on the short bus like “Peter,” here’s the CBO’s quick list:
“Funding for Each Operation. According to CRS estimates, Congress has
appropriated about $864 billion for Iraq in budget authority (BA) from FY2001 through the
recently passed FY2008 Supplemental for DOD, the State Department and for
medical costs paid by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (P.L. 110-252).”
estimates that this total includes about $657 billion for Iraq (76%),
Liberalism is idiocy. Idiocy is liberalism. It is proven on Wooten’s blog daily. The truth and facts are out there. People who vote Democrat don’t seek them nor do they care to, because liberalism is born, bred, fed, and grown on ignorance and mindless emotionalism.
Finally, to drive the point home, notice how “Peter” did not take on anything else I said in my 11:56AM on Friday.
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Ragnar Danneskjöld
March 14th, 2009
8:38 am
Dear Tingling @ 8:40, well-argued, impressive. I did not check your research, but it is consonant with my beliefs.
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Redneck Convert
March 14th, 2009
8:48 am
Well, I about run over a Chevy Cavalier on the way home yesterday but I could tell it wasn’t Sister Dusty. It had a Obama sticker and a Peace sign and librul stuff like that. I would of been worryed if it had a Bush for a Third Term or a No Taxes sticker.
Anyhow, Ford trucks beat Chevy trucks hands down. I wouldn’t part with my Ford F-450 for all the luxury trucks in the world. I ride up high in style and when people look at the size they think it’s kind of a way of saying I got a big You Know What. I look at the little cars and trucks on the highway and kind of sneer. I bet my truck cost more than my trailer. I see lots of people that think the same way. People wearing suits and ties and driving pickups that look more like tractor trailers than pickups.
Well, it’s another one of those days you have to spend indoors. It’s even too wet for a four-wheeler race up the hillsides. So I’m just staying indoors with some fried pork skins and a couple cases of PBR to see if my Dawgs make the NCAA tournament. I kind of doubt it. The last I looked they were coached by one of Those People and Tech got the same problem. It’s OK to have Those People playing because they can jump and run good, but not coaching because they can’t think as good as the rest of us.
I sure hope this Bob Barr ain’t the new Conservative writter at the AJC. He’s a Trader to us Conservatives for crittersizing My President back when he was in office and God was still in the White House.
Have a good weekend everybody.
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Road Scholar
March 14th, 2009
8:56 am
Jim, this is for your and other conservative bloggers who are against alledged socialism.
“Yet as Bluestone’s analysis documents, that’s exactly what state government already does. It transfers a significant amount of wealth from more affluent areas of Georgia to less affluent areas, a transfer that is perfectly natural and appropriate.”
The above quote is from a GSU study on the expenditure of Ga’s tax dollars by the present Repub regime. It appears that we are already socialist, by your definition. And this is occurring not only under the repubs watch, but also with a repub legislature and Gov!
This should end ALL consrvative drivel concerning Obama’s economic policies and Socialism, shouldn’t it!
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Road Scholar
March 14th, 2009
8:58 am
P.S. My blog was posted at 9:56 AM but listed as 8:56. Does this mean your columns do not recognize DST? It confirms that you are behind the times!
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
9:40 am
Thanks, Ragnar. It doesn’t take much effort to find the truth out there. First the libtards whined about Faux News exposing liberal lies and failures, and now it apparently is the good ‘ole internet. If you haven’t heard, the Obama nazi police have stripped Wikipedia of any negatives and have a tight lock on who updates the Wiki entries. We can expect more of this type of liberal left wing Obamanchuriancandidate mentality in the near future:
“A perusal through Obama’s current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama’s most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year. Even more to the point, his background in Chicago politics and how he got involved in said politics – and the seemingly concurrent rapid rise to power – is not referenced.”
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findawg
March 14th, 2009
9:47 am
Hall County is lining up its sixth pay by the penny proposition to provide funding for basic public services. They have yet to complete, or even start, all that was promised in phase five. The country bumpkins have learned well from their metropolitan cousins. The outsiders will help pay for the schools and roads we need. The poor and the illegals will finally pay their share for the government that serves us all. And should this proposal fail we will be consigned to gridlock with ignorant children because we were too cheap to give just one percent more on our daily purchases. We could not enforce our own development laws and have the A-List developer’s pay for the public improvements that enrich them; especially when they happen to be the county commissioners and their large land-owning families…
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
9:49 am
And if anyone thinks my comments about the Obama administration are hyperbole, I submit this latest example as evidence of what we are in for. Anyone getting in the way of this madness of a growing Marxist state (”socialism” is such a meaningless and benign word in describing what the modern moonbat liberal left wants for this nation) will be swiftly dealt with:
“The Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched an investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona following requests by congressional Democrats and allegations by liberal activists that the department has violated the civil rights of illegal aliens.”
“Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Robert Scott (D-Va.) requested the investigation, and activists groups such as National Day Laborer Organizer Network and ACORN launched petition drives and rallies in support of the probe.”
“The investigation focuses on Sheriff Joe Arpaio and dozens of officers under his command who were trained through the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS), which partners federal and local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws. (The Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division is known popularly as ICE.)”
“…16,000 inmates were determined to be illegal aliens. Either they have already been deported or will be deported after being tried and/or serving their sentences for crimes committed in the valley. The work being done be Arpaio’s detention staff is a likely contributor to the recent reduction in crime in the valley…”
Cliff Notes version: the libtards are pi$$ed off that Maricopa County is doing its job on unlawful immigration, and the result is future Dimocrat voters are being sent back to where they came from, and therefore Maricopa County must be stopped at all costs.
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Ga Values
March 14th, 2009
10:09 am
I really don’t understand what your point is.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 14th, 2009
10:39 am
By John Feehery, worked for the House Republican leadership from 1989 to 2005. He is the founder of The Feehery Group, a strategic advocacy firm, and blogs at http://www.thefeeherytheory.com.
“I was talking to a Republican mayor of a fairly large city in the southern part of the United States, and the subject of earmarks came up. He was a big fan. “It is a lot easier for me to get the attention of my local congressman than it is to get the attention of a bureaucrat here in Washington.”
And that is the fundamental conundrum of the Republican attack on the earmarking process.
Lots of Republicans not only love earmarks, they rely on earmarks to get the attention of an indifferent and sometimes hostile bureaucracy.
Getting rid of earmarks is not only impractical; it gives way too much power to the executive branch.
Earmarks are a small, but essential, price to pay to protect democracy and our form of representative government.
Our nation’s founders bestowed upon Congress the power of the purse as a reaction to the absolute power of King George and his fellow monarchs. But what good is the power of the purse without the right to actually direct some of the spending of the president.
Undoubtedly, Congress has abused their power to spend the people’s money, and unfortunately, corruption has become all too commonplace.
But the reaction to this corruption should not be the wholesale abdication of power to an all-powerful executive.
Rather, Congress should reform its spending ways to rebuild the taxpayer’s trust in the process.
First, it should insist on transparency. Last-minute deals to add special little projects, all to buy votes, should be prohibited.
Second, it should insist that the committee of jurisdiction authorize all appropriated projects. The authorization process should be revitalized to give each and every spending request the scrutiny it deserves.
Third, no member should be given the power to be able to both authorize and appropriate spending projects. The temptation is simply too great when members have that much power to spend taxpayers dollars.
Fourth, the Congress should use an outside accrediting agency (perhaps GAO or the CBO) to give a seal of approval that the spending requests are in the national interest, and not just in the parochial or private interest of the requesting member.
Of course, earmarking is not something that happens only with the Appropriations Committee. The Transportation Committee (because of the unique way it spends money from its various trust funds) and the Ways and Means Committee (tax provisions) also have been known to compel the bureaucracy to do things it might not normally do.
All of that is completely appropriate when it is done in the national interest. It is completely inappropriate when done at the behest and for the private benefit of a special interest.
That the earmarking process needs reform is obvious. But reforming earmarks will not suddenly make Congress fiscally responsible. In fact, as has often been mentioned before, earmarks made up only a tiny percentage of total spending in the budget. And the Congress can take out every earmark, dedicate those savings to deficit reduction, and still not make even a minor dent in the huge budget problems that face the nation.
But that doesn’t mean that reform of the earmark process is unimportant. The people have lost faith in the Congress because it has spent like a drunken sailor for far too long, on projects – like the infamous Bridge to Nowhere – that don’t pass the laugh test. If Congress can come up with a process on earmarks that can help restore faith in the institution, by insisting on transparency, on a vigorous authorization process, on a dispersal of power, and on outside accreditation for all spending, it will be in a better position to tackle the truly big spending issue of the next 30 years, the dangerous growth of entitlement spending.
Republicans like John McCain and John Boehner are right to shine a spotlight on the broken congressional spending system. But the answer is to fix that system, not give all the power to spend to President Obama.
A lot of Republican mayors, county executives and governors don’t want to just rely on the good graces of an Obama administration, no matter how much they might like the president. They are relying on congressional Republicans to help with their spending requests. It is neither good politics nor good policy to ignore those requests and give all the power to the executive branch to do with the money as they see fit.”
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
11:02 am
GA Values: you have a hard time understanding the point of this?
‘“Claims have been made,” he notes, “regarding the potential geographic imbalance between the revenues generated in an area and the public expenditures received.” His research, therefore, is an “attempt to document these flows.” To what purpose? That is clear. To establish conclusively and finally that metro Atlanta is entitled to more state money. This is, after all, the dirt that accounts for 61 percent of state revenues, while it receives 47 percent. Those 28 counties — metro Atlanta as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau — hold 54 percent of Georgia’s population.’
Seems pretty clear to me.
Let’s take the first quote to the local level within Atlanta:
“Claims have been made,” he notes, “regarding the potential geographic imbalance between the revenues generated in an area and the public expenditures received.”
That would be those in north Fulton, and specifically, those living in areas like Vinings, West Paces Ferry, and unicorporated areas of north Fulton who have already or are working on being incorporated like Johns Creek & Milton (and yes, their incorporation and separation from Fulton County gubment being “racist” has been duly noted). I can’t speak for roads in the latter two, but I do know that roads and Fulton County police patrols in and around Vinings and West Paces Ferry SUCK. Where is all that tax property money from those gazillionaire homes going?
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
11:25 am
You just have to love this. Oklahoma, if memory serves me correctly, was once home to Obama’s mother and grandmother. (Side note: watching the libtards drool over Bristol Palin having broken up with Levi Johnston is very entertaining – our current president’s mother was an unwed teen mom). Anyway, on to the news. This, from the libs at the Washington ComPost of all places. That’s right Mr. “Bring Change To Washington!” Blame Bush when the reality of being a president sits in:
By Scott Wilson
updated 4:51 a.m. ET, Sat., March. 14, 2009
“In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
“It hasn’t taken long for the recriminations to return — or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome “inheritance” of its predecessor.”
“Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems “inherited” from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The “deepening economic crisis” that the president described six days after taking office became “a big mess” in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hey Nancy, someone left a message stating that the swamp you drained is rising again. LOL.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh but wait, didn’t the OH TEAM state earlier this week that the economy isn’t as bad as it is being reported?
Why yes my child, they DID:
Mar 12 05:49 PM US/Eastern
By JIM KUHNHENN
Associated Press Writer
“WASHINGTON (AP) – Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.”
“Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation’s “confidence builder in chief,” Obama said Americans shouldn’t be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was “highly optimistic” about the long term.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No, you cannot make up this kind of schizophrenia. GREAT JOB AMERICA!!!!
Idiots.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
11:31 am
Has anyone else noticed the schizophrenia of the Obama administration?
Exhibit A:
By Scott Wilson – Washington Post
updated 4:51 a.m. ET, Sat., March. 14, 2009
In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Obama has strengthened his rhetoric gradually. Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said the administration’s “sharpened language is a response to the Republican argument against Obama based on huge deficits and big spending.”
Six days after taking office, Obama kicked off an event on jobs, energy reform and climate change with “a few words about the deepening economic crisis that we’ve inherited.” He lamented announced job cuts at such economic mainstays as Microsoft, Intel, Home Depot and Caterpillar, among others.
Just over a week later, Obama, arguing for his stimulus plan, said that “we’ve inherited a terrible mess,” and a few days after that, in the economically depressed city of Elkhart, Ind., he told the audience, “We’ve inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression.”
Exhibit B:
Mar 12 05:49 PM US/Eastern
By JIM KUHNHENN
Associated Press Writer
“WASHINGTON (AP) – Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is “not as bad as we think” and his plans will speed recovery.”
No, you cannot make this kind of stuff up, and don’t look to the libtard media like CNN’s “No Bias, No Bull” laugh-in.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
11:33 am
Oops, I meant to only post one of those two posts above, not both. Oh well, the truth never lies.
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Jackie
March 14th, 2009
12:17 pm
@Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg
Obama’s mother was not a teenage mom. She was married to Obama’s father in Hawaii.
As for Bristol Palin, a vast majority of the “liberals” do not take issue with Bristol, but with the Repubs using her to further their cynical case.
President Obama should make everyone aware of what was passed by the Repubs and Dubya. Obviously there is a big desire for the public to have a major bout of amnesia.
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catlady
March 14th, 2009
12:47 pm
Sarah Palin: You can’t be proclaiming against stealing when your own hand is in the cookie jar. And to use an unfortunate decision by your child to try to further your own standing is dispicable. Her son (he is off to war! Forget why he had to join up), her daugher (she WILL be marrying the boy. And notice, she DIDN”T get an abortion. ‘Cause we are all about “family values”), and her youngest son (See, I didn’t abort him!) All that seems so cynical to me. If you claim the higher ground, you need to be sure you can stand on it.
findawg, are you still under the misunderstanding that there are any folks, other than monks and the dead, who DON”T pay property tax directly or indirectly? And that there is a special line at Walmart for the illegals so they don’t have to pay sales tax? And that those working for businesses don’t have income tax withheld? And that it is the WHITE MAN who hires them under the table?
Personally, I just voted against an extension of the SPLOST. I think Board members should have to explain and justify their decisions to the electorate, rather than having the candy bag open for their hands. And I am not at all happy with the use made of money on other splosts. SPLOSTS help elected officials stay elected. I say, let them run on their records.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
12:59 pm
“Obama’s mother was not a teenage mom. She was married to Obama’s father in Hawaii.”
Jackie: thanks for proving my point of how mindless and emotion-driven you liberals are.
A quick review of FACTS is in order here, as usual when dealing with a libtard. Here is what I posted:
“(Side note: watching the libtards drool over Bristol Palin having broken up with Levi Johnston is very entertaining – our current president’s mother was an unwed teen mom).”
Moonbat: she got pregnant while not married as a teen. That is a fact. Exactly what part of that FACT do you libtards not understand? But unlike you moonbats, I’m not holding that against her. Her son turned out quite well, albeit I don’t agree with just about everything that comes out of his teleprompter-driven mouth…
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
1:09 pm
More:
Amanda Ripley reported in Time magazine: “On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama’s parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II . . .
“The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. ‘I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?’ Obama wonders. ‘I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more.’”
Barack Obama Sr. left Ann and their son in 1963, and she married Lolo Soetoro, the presidential candidate’s stepfather, in 1967.
Source:
Time Magazine
Okay, I retract my comment: an unwed teenage conceptual mother. The point here is that the libtards are having a heyday over Bristol’s break up. Period end of story.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
1:14 pm
On to more important news. Let’s see if the libtards at the DNC media will start squawking about THESE jobs going overseas under Obama’s watch (my wild off-the-wall guess is HELL NO – more “change” we can believe in, folks):
JPMorgan Chase to Increase India Outsourcing 25%
America’s second-largest bank plans to spend $400 million on work outsourced to India to streamline its IT operations
By Pankaj Mishra
Businessweek
Economic Times of India March 9, 2009, 7:47AM EST
America’s second-largest bank plans to spend $400 million on work outsourced to India to streamline its IT operations
The second-biggest bank of the US, JP Morgan Chase, which acquired Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns recently, will increase its outsourcing to India by 25% this year to nearly $400 million. It will also manage the integration of the acquired companies from India to bring down the cost of integrating different information technology (IT) systems.
Right now, JP Morgan outsources $250-300 million worth of IT and back-office projects every year to Cognizant, TCS and Accenture, apart from to its own captive centre in Mumbai.
“JP Morgan CIO Guy Chiarello said last week that he will increase outsourcing to India, and will drive several integration projects from there,” a New York-based expert, familiar with JP Morgan’s outsourcing plans, told ET last week, on conditions of anonymity. A spokeswoman for JP Morgan India could not reply to an email query sent by ET on Friday, and the bank’s spokesperson in the US too did not reply.
“JP Morgan is one of the first banks in the US to have fleshed out its outsourcing
strategy ever since the banking meltdown happened. Many others are still undecided about their IT spend,” said a senior official at one of the technology firms, who did not wish to be quoted.
The bank, which cancelled its $5-billion outsourcing contract with IBM in 2004—following the merger with Bank One—had brought back around 4,000 IT staff in-house after the new CIO Austin Adams had proposed a “do-it-yourself” strategy for the merged entity.
“In this economic environment, Mr. Chiarello, the current CIO, wants to ensure that he helps JP Morgan meet cost-reduction goals,” the expert added. With large global banks like Lloyds TSB and HBOS, and Bank of America & Merrill Lynch merging, India’s top tech firms, including Infosys, TCS and Cognizant, are bidding for at least three $100 million-plus contracts.
As these banks merge, they face a huge task of integrating their software applications, consolidating their data centres and other trading platforms into a single entity, so that their customers are able to transact without having to face any merger-related issues. And since offshoring will help them save costs by 30-40%, these merged banking entities are seeking to partner with a vendor having significant offshore presence. “Apart from looking at cost-saving opportunities, such as offshore outsourcing, these banks also want to partner with their existing vendors because they would know the systems better,” said a consultant on condition of anonymity.
As reported by ET recently, Lloyds TSB—which merged with HBOS—is seeking partners to help the merged entity integrate its retail and wholesale banking systems through an IT platform. The company has already outsourced its HR functions to Xansa two years ago, in a five-year deal.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
1:19 pm
Oh wait, I’m not done yet! More “change” we can believe in folks! Let’s see, this time, it’s the “change” of the arrogant Bush administration who thumbed his nose at foreign nations and Obama was going to fix that. Well, here’s your fix, Obamabots:
From Times Online
March 10, 2009
Cabinet chief lambasts ‘incredibly difficult’ Obama team over G20
Britain’s most senior civil servant has complained that Downing Street is finding it “unbelievably difficult” to make arrangements with the United States for the crucial G20 summit.
Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, reportedly said that the handover to the Obama Administration was hindering discussions about the meeting in London next month.
The Prime Minister hopes that the summit on April 2 will produce a co-ordinated global strategy to tackle the economic downturn.
So far, his attempts to get his Washington and European allies to agree to a coherent common platform for the meeting have proved frustrating.
The G20 nations, which represent about 90 per cent of world economic activity, include not only the traditional G7 members but the European Union and emerging economic powers such as China and Brazil.
Mr O’Donnell said that No 10 was having trouble even getting in touch with key personnel at the US Treasury department. “There is nobody there,” he told a civil service conference in Gateshead. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.”
His comments come after Downing Street was left frustrated by the White House’s chaotic handling of Gordon Brown’s visit last week. No 10 aides were left scrambling when the President’s staff changed press arrangements at the 11th hour.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
1:21 pm
“No 10 aides were left scrambling when the President’s staff changed press arrangements at the 11th hour.”
Heh. I guess those teleprompters were having technical difficulties……
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Jackie
March 14th, 2009
2:04 pm
@Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg
As usual, you so-called conservatives try to extrapolate, obfuscate and issue plain BS when you get your knickers in a knot.
You stated clearly that Barack Obama’s mother was not married to his father.
Secondly, she was not a teen, but a graduate student in Hawaii. I think that would put her past the age of 21, don’t you think SLOW MOTION?
Secondly, you have the right to disagree with anything you choose, but, someone like you should be careful with what direction they choose as it appears you have been led down the primrose path only to find that all the other sheep had jumped off the cliff.
The teleprompter being used by the President is readily available to you, if you choose to run for office and is somehow elected. Care to try?
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
3:26 pm
Look who’s all upset at a menial point on Obama. Jackie! Go figure with all the other FAILURES of the current administration.
“You stated clearly that Barack Obama’s mother was not married to his father.
Secondly, she was not a teen, but a graduate student in Hawaii. I think that would put her past the age of 21, don’t you think SLOW MOTION?”
I stated that Obama’s mother was an UNWED TEEN MOTHER – at the time – which I restated and corrected. I backed that up by a Time magazine report. Now, whether or not you libtards want to define the definition of “mother” or not is not up to me. Me, personally? I find a pregnant woman a MOTHER of said unborn child. But, if you libtards want to split hairs on technicalities, knock yourselves out.
“you have been led down the primrose path only to find that all the other sheep had jumped off the cliff.”
Maybe you missed that part where the OH TEAM has received a GRADE F!!!!!! for handling the economic situation. And sheep? Please. Don’t lecture us on sheep falling off a cliff after the election last year, moonbat.
“The teleprompter being used by the President is readily available to you,”
Any idiot can speak publicly with constant teleprompters in front of him. The difference is Obama depends on them and when he gets caught off guard, it shows.
Next…
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
3:31 pm
And ANOTHER point on Obama: why is information on his background SO. HARD. TO FIND?
For Jackie the libtard: The internet is your friend, you mindless hysterical liberal MOONBAT:
“Obama Sr. eventually told Ann about his first marriage in Kenya, but said he was divorced, which she would find out years later was not true.[19] Dunham was three months pregnant at the time of her marriage.[1][3] On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child, Barack Obama II.[20]“
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
3:39 pm
Yeah that’s right, Nanny Pelosi, you drained that swamp well with that broom of yours…
March 13, 2009 – 6:20am
FBI raid at the office of D.C.\’s Chief Technology Officer.
Mark Segraves, WTOP Radio
WASHINGTON – An employee of the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer and a private contractor were charged with corruption Thursday after an FBI raid at the former office of one of President Obama’s appointees, Vivek Kundra.
Kundra is on leave from his White House job until further details of the case become known, a White House source tells the Associated Press. Kundra has not been linked to Thursday’s raid. Yusuf Acar, 40, acting chief security officer of the D.C. Office of the CTO, was charged with bribery of a public official, money laundering, wire fraud and conflict of interest.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
3:43 pm
Earmarks for the Kennedy legacy. Huh. Will there be a display of a sunken car with a dead intern in these earmarks? Are these the same type of taxpayer funds that libtards b*tched about Reagan & Bush I over for legacy acknowledgment? Yeah, thought so.
BOSTON – More than one out of every five dollars of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys.
The bill includes $5.8 million for the planning and design of a building to house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The funding may also help support an endowment for the institute.
The bill also includes $22 million to expand facilities at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and $5 million more for a new gateway to the Boston Harbor Islands on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a park system in downtown Boston named after Kennedy’s mother and built on land opened up by the Big Dig highway project.
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Glenn
March 14th, 2009
4:31 pm
This is an elegantly written and well considered column, Jim. For my money it ranks with your best.
As you know, I have qualms with Georgia’s pursuit of the Quality Education Model, the so-called “adequacy model”. It is simplistic to think that we could arrive at a dollar figure that would pay for an “adequate” education for every child; moreover, I doubt that the Governor and General Assembly, or any of their consiglieri, could do it. Oregon failed to do it credibly. So did California.
When Leland Stanford opened his university, he insisted that it be operated tuition-free and that its enrollment be limited to destitute males. One of his trustees, a fellow robber baron, remarked that the plan constituted “throwing a four thousand dollar education after a four-dollar boy”. Some pupils cost four dollars to educate; others, four thousand.
In the rural counties transportation costs — big bus fleets — run necessarily high. In relatively impoverished areas, the feds backfill big chunks of school funding with categorical programs, with AFDC and free and reduced-price meal programs. In troubled urban districts it’s often necessary to increase teachers’ salaries to attract and retain good frontline educators. On a somewhat subtler note, it seems ludicrous to bill taxpayers to teach literacy to privileged suburban children who come to school already knowing the basics. Costs do vary according to what happens above the dirt. More importantly, they vary according to what happens within the individual human mind and heart.
Your second educational point, a call for vouchers based on the adequacy model, is I’m afraid equally simplistic. I laud your objectives and your tenacity, however, so let me try a tangent on you.
How about issuing each pupil an educational credit card, redeemable at qualifying points of service delivery? The card could be loaded up, or not, according to the individual’s education needs and progress. Believe it or not, the mag strips on the back of our actual credit cards contain a great deal of surplus memory capacity: they are capable of holding a good deal of data. Were pupils issued such cards, the cards could contain information on the student’s individual learning plan, on her academic progress and history. Students dislocated from a given educational setting — students who move for reasons ranging from intra-district transfer to disaster evacuation — then could rely upon the card for a measure of educational continuity.
Does that sound promising?
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Glenn
March 14th, 2009
4:50 pm
findog,
I take Jim’s point to be that we’d be better served were the leaders to take us on a path of border-to-border, comprehensive statewide finance and planning that would knit Georgia together in a way that the current hub-and-spoke model does not (Metro being the hub).
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Glenn
March 14th, 2009
4:54 pm
As for infrastructure planning, I’d still like to learn what General Sherman had in mind. He’d cared as much about Georgia’s reconstruction as MacArthur did about Japan’s; he was a superb engineer and logistician; and he was an expert in transportation, once Georgia’s strong suit. I’ve always construed things historically, and have found it useful, at least to people of my bent, to begin with a specific historical context and to move forward from there, so as to learn how we arrived at this pass.
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@@
March 14th, 2009
5:39 pm
I’ve been over here on four separate occasions, Jim…..every time I’m reading something between the furrows that makes me laugh. Maybe it’s just me suffering from cabin fever.
Anyhoosiers, equal disbursement? All planting should occur after Good Friday….or so say the old plowers.
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@@
March 14th, 2009
6:49 pm
Off-topic!
Uh Oh! The Pakistani Interior Ministry has warned Sharif of an impending threat to his life. Granted, this could be to discourage his appearance at protests against the PPL but Prime Minister Gilani immediately ordered “foolproof” protection to Sharif.
Even so, the threat that jihadist groups might assassinate top political figures is very real — and the implications thereof are very grave.
The jihadists have an interest in creating anarchy, and there is no better way to do this than by killing political leaders — especially leaders like Sharif, despite his reluctance to take a tough stand against the jihadist insurgency. After Bhutto’s death, Sharif became Pakistan’s only leader of national prominence.
Assassinating Sharif would trigger riots, especially in Punjab, his home province and the largest province in the country. The resulting chaos could help the jihadists expand their insurgency from the Pashtun areas in the tribal belt and the NWFP to Punjab, which is close to the South Asian country’s troubled northwest and home to its own brand of jihadist groups that enjoy a significant social support base. Security in Punjab going the way of the country’s Pashtun areas would represent a significant blow to the cohesion of the Pakistani state, and a significant security threat to neighboring India.
Yikes!
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Sunshine
March 14th, 2009
8:27 pm
Jim;
Yep a statewide approach is needed badly. Too bad that for 7 years now and now doubt it will be 8 years, that Georgia has done very little to improve the transportation system of the state. Meanwhile other states have poured many into transportation recognizing the beneficial economic impacts and the consequence of a better life for their citizens. Meanwhile Metro Atlanta is now known for its transportation gridlock and less than desirable place to locate a business. The focus seems to stay on issues of morality, which although important providing only a guide to conduct our affairs in good stead, it does not create markets and will not help Georgia compete in a world economy.
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Kamchak
March 14th, 2009
8:49 pm
“Claims have been made regarding the potential geographic imbalance between the revenues generated in an area and the public expenditure received…attempt to document these flows…out-of-state and out-of-region visitor spending did not significantly affect sales tax collections in fiscal year 2004.”
Mr. Wooten: You quote two and a half sentences of “an exhaustive (what about this study exhausted you?) study” that you offer no link to. What is clear to me, using only what you quoted from the study, is that Mr. Bluestone is attempting to address “claims” (who made these “claims”? Does he identify these claimants? If he does why don’t you cite them?) of imbalances. What is not clear to me is the motive “to establish conclusively and finally that metro Atlanta is entitled to more state revenue” that you ascribe to Mr. Bluestone. This may well be his motive, but that isn’t clear to me without having read the study in its’ entirety. Mr. Wooten, you also make claims that this study is funded by public money (is this supposed to be a bad thing? Public money being used to find out where public money is being spent sounds better to me than contracting it out to a for-profit company with possible conflicts of interest with competing clients). Again you make these claims with no substantiation.
“Bluestone’s research is superb and the data rich. It establishes conclusively, for example, that the voters are being hoodwinked by those who push local option sales taxes…” Is “hoodwinked” the word he used in his study or are you putting words in his mouth? Again, the two and a half sentences you quote from this study establishes no such conclusion.
The only conclusion that I can make is that you are using this study for another reactionary claim of OH MY GOD! I cannot BELIEVE what THEY are doing to US now. This talk radio (us good, them bad) mindset has framed debate in this country for thirty years. For thirty years voices have been marginalized, villified, demonized and its owners have been called godless, secular-humanist traitors. One of the changes that our new president brings is hopefully a change in the frame of the debate, where we can disagree with civility.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 14th, 2009
9:00 pm
“One of the changes that our new president brings is hopefully a change in the frame of the debate, where we can disagree with civility.”
Moonbat libtard: we’ve listened to 8 years of hatred from you mindless hysterics on the left. Payback is in order. Get used to it.
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Eleanor Rigby
March 14th, 2009
9:59 pm
To: Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg,
Just wanted to let you know the Fulton County Police Department only patrols areas in their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction in unincorporated Fulton County. There are no unincorporated areas north of I-20 or in the city of Atlanta. So, it would seem it’s your local police department’s patrol that suck. You may want to contact your mayor. Thank you.
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Kamchak
March 14th, 2009
10:27 pm
@ Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg:
Thirty years of a binary program has left you in a perpetual state of prepubescence. I quit playing cowboys and indians when I got my first pair of long pants.
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Chris Broe
March 15th, 2009
12:37 am
CNN just reported that the piece of space debris that almost took out the space station was actually an Iraqi Shoe. The man should get three years for this. Who are those guys?
Diceman was fired by Donald Trump.
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Bill Shipp
March 15th, 2009
6:01 am
Did I hear somebody say “change?” The word is too mild. Try “train wreck,” if you are a Republican. “A new beginning” may fit your feelings better – if you voted Democratic in the last presidential election.
In either case, I have the feeling our political nation is about to be turned upside down. President Barack Obama has drawn up a national to-do list that may require an administration of miracle-makers to accomplish.
The country is on the edge of owing a horrendous debt created by the Democrats to rescue us from the economic chaos of the previous GOP presidential administration.
Workers in the steel mills and auto plants of America may feel a faint hope. After years of decline, American-made cars and steel could be poised to bounce back on the strength of a bailout.
If you’re from the Midwest, you may feel a rush of opportunity springing from the energy crisis. Vehicles fueled with the equivalent of corn liquor could save us from the oil barons.
The great universities of New England and California may be free to enter a new era of scientific research that will propel America to the head of the line in healing and preventing diseases.
It may take a year or two to determine whether the new dreams for this democracy can materialize: whether we can make better cars and more money, whether we can teach our kids to be as smart as the Chinese or Indians, whether innovation and creativity still are bywords.
And it may take a year or two to determine whether the American South can bounce back as the region of new dreams and endeavors. Scanning voter statistics from the last election, one would have to conclude the South of 2009 is in about the same position as it was in 1929: running short on leaders and long on dopes.
Unless Obama’s scenario for the future changes dramatically, the South is not going to play much of a role in the reinvigoration of a nation.
Few Southerners and almost no Georgians have been tapped for leadership roles in the Obama administration. That is hardly surprising. Obama drew relatively few votes from Georgia and other Old Confederate states. America may have shown it was ready for a black president.
The South, and especially Georgia, demonstrated it was not ready for a Barack Obama.
In the early days of his administration, Obama signed an executive order rescinding President Bush’s restrictions on using public funds for stem cell research. Before the ink was dry on the order, Georgia’s Republican leaders drafted a proposal to prevent government-funded stem cell research in the Peach State.
So much for the dreams. Georgia’s best minds once had envisioned Georgia and much of the South as leaders in stem cell research.
We forgot an old axiom: In the South, when scientific findings clash with Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy always wins.
In much of the country, the election of Obama as president is regarded as our most remarkable political outcome in years.
In the South, however, the “most remarkable” certificate went to the Republican Party. Overnight, the Grand Old Party turned into little more than a regional organization with a one-word motto, “No!” Many of the same Republicans who constructed the trillion-dollar national debt in just six years are now staunchly on the side of frugality.
At least one Georgia Republican left an indelible mark in our history books. Rep./Dr. Phil Gingrey sharply criticized radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh for publicly hoping Obama would fail as president. Then a panicky Dr. Phil, realizing he had taken issue with the GOP’s generalissimo, hastily apologized.
At press time, a duel for the Republican crown appeared to be shaping up between Limbaugh and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is credited with coining the phrase, “Kill all Democrats.”
Back in Atlanta, remnants of the old Republican Party shook their heads in disbelief. Georgia Republicans had not been viewed as such political oddballs since moderate Republican challenger Newt Gingrich of Carrollton ran against incumbent Democratic Congressman Jack Flynt of Griffin back in the mid-1970s, and lost in a landslide.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
7:02 am
@@,
Seriously, would you please strive to make your more muscular comments, which comments you might make a mite less adorably?
Yes, and I’m quite sorry. But it’s rather distracting.
All of which is to say: there’s something about your intelligent naturalness that makes your writings unusually honest, immediate, heart-engaging. Please, my friend, you really ought to launch a blog. (Like you really need another hassle.)
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Redneck Convert
March 15th, 2009
7:22 am
Well, Wooten got it 100% Right. Us people that don’t want to tax ourselfs more deserve the tax money that the rich libruls in the Atlanta area make. It’s not our fault they are better schooled and make alot more money than we do. Me, I think we need to go back to the old county unit system to make sure the Atlanta libruls don’t start taking more of their money back and cause us to tax ourselfs more to pay for the things we want.
We need the good roads and the schools and other stuff that makes our life good out here in the country. But we sure don’t want to have to pay for all of it. So it’s OK to put our hand in some rich Atlanta librul’s pocket and let them pick up some of the tab. Far as we’re concerned, this is one case where Socialism’s good. We can take from the rich people in Atlanta that pay alot of taxes and keep more of what we make ourselfs. That way we can keep guvmint small. But Socialism don’t work in any other case.
So I say if you’ve got them down then stomp them some more. I love to read about how people in the Atlanta area vote to tax theirselfs more to get what they want. That just means I get more of what I want too without having to pay for it. The state will see to it Atlanta libruls don’t get to keep all the tax money they pay. That means my taxes stay low and they pay three times as much. Serves them right.
Have a good day everybody.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
8:03 am
Thank you Eleanor for the information on Fulton County’s patrols. So, back to my original point, why are residents in north Fulton County paying the same tax rate as someone who lives in another part of Fulton County who have sheriff department patrols? Seems like your typical taxation without representation to me.
Kamchak: I know you libtards get upset when someone trashes your party of moonbats in Washington (extreme hypocritical ones at that), but it is not Bush’s fault that every time Dems open their forked tongue mouths the stock market falls. Since the Nanny and cohorts took over Congress in 2007, the Dow has dropped by HALF. Since the election last November alone when the bad news that Obama won, the Dow has dropped 22%.
Now you can call that cowboys and indians playing like some mindless snotty nosed whining five year old, but I call it a serious amount of lost money under a Democrat congress’s watch and more recently, a Democrat president’s watch. The evil rich in this nation so reviled by the loonbat left have lost half their wealth. I’d like to know how the neo-Marxist Dem party is going to tax just them for their Utopian socialist causes. And congratulations on your long pants, but perhaps they are on too loose – either that, or the fat went from your belly to your head when you decided to vote Democrat with the rest of the children.
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Big Bucks GOP
March 15th, 2009
8:03 am
Those wackos in the Georgia Legislature made the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/politics/14stem.html?ref=politics
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
8:16 am
To Mr. Shipp:
“And it may take a year or two to determine whether the American South can bounce back as the region of new dreams and endeavors. Scanning voter statistics from the last election, one would have to conclude the South of 2009 is in about the same position as it was in 1929: running short on leaders and long on dopes.”
Funny. I still continue to see northeastern liberals moving down here in droves from their former socialist liberal run (and taxed to hell) areas like New Jersey; I still continue to see Detroitans them move down here to find automobile and manufacturing jobs that disappeared in Michigan; I still see Californians move here where the Democrat-run state (and don’t give me that Arnold runs the state BS – state congress makes the laws, rules, and regulations) have taxed that state to hell and back so hard people can hardly afford to live there and corporations and LLCs are leaving like a stampede of buffalo. Now what was your point again?
“Unless Obama’s scenario for the future changes dramatically, the South is not going to play much of a role in the reinvigoration of a nation.”
See above.
“Few Southerners and almost no Georgians have been tapped for leadership roles in the Obama administration. That is hardly surprising. Obama drew relatively few votes from Georgia and other Old Confederate states. America may have shown it was ready for a black president. The South, and especially Georgia, demonstrated it was not ready for a Barack Obama.”
That is the most ridiculous, but not unsurprising, comment that is so typical of libtards from the Dimocrat party. Is the South rejecting Michael Steele? Did the South reject Colin Powell under Bush I? Did the South reject Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas under Bush II? The answer is no, no, no and NO! People with mentalities like that still stuck on stupid circa-1960s stigma of the South are the ones behind the times. Maybe – and I’m going way out on a limb to say this – but maybe some can’t comprehend that Southerners are CONSERVATIVE by nature and have major, MAJOR problems voting for a liberal Democrat. Further, over the course of the last 20 years or so, why are many if not most of the racist news stories coming out of areas other than the South? Here, see this most recent example from NEW YAWK:
03/03/09 06:48 AM
Falls police say woman put up racist sign
NIAGARA FALLS—Two days after a man was sentenced to probation and community service for putting up a sign as a “joke” in a public works garage that said “whites only” on a drinking fountain, city police were called to a home in the 600 block of 25th Street on Sunday to investigate another racially charged sign.
This one was clearly no joke.
No charges were filed Sunday, but police told the woman she must take down the handwritten sign on a fence on her property saying, “I rent three bedrooms [at her address to] white people Niagara Falls.”
The 53-year-old woman told police she put up the sign after someone tried to break into her house and added, “I can do what I want. I live in America,” according to a police report.
Police said they received complaints and she must take the sign down. An officer at the scene said the woman agreed to take down the sign under protest. The officer said the woman already had seven more signs she was planning to hang up.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
8:24 am
Finally, Mr. Shipp, we Southerners will not stand for anyone from other parts of this nation already destroyed by unions and uber-tax policies by liberal Democrats coming down here to destroy our part of the nation, like pushing for unionizing all those Japanese, Korean, and European car manufacturer plants that did not go to New Jersey, Michigan, or California. Is that pretty clear enough?
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Caveman
March 15th, 2009
9:15 am
Rural Georgians are nothing more than parastic welfare queens sucking money out of Atlantans pockets. Wooten will turn his usual right-wing rhetoric on it’s head to excuse the confiscation of wealth be backwoods Georgia because they are mostly bible-thumping ill-educated conservatives.
It’s great that Wooten proves yet again that conservatives have no principals or values that don’t bend when convenient. Way is excuse the massive welfare for your fellow travelers.
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Caveman
March 15th, 2009
9:33 am
Since Wooten’s opinion is that tax money should be spread equally across Georgia, wouldn’t his essay be more appropriate if titled “Share the Wealth”?
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
9:33 am
I seriously think that Bill Shipp needs not ponder other people’s tingling danglings. He’s a most considered correspondent, with many better things to think about. For heaven’s sake, man!
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
9:33 am
Well what do you know. Washington D.C. has a local AIDS/HIV pandemic. Maybe The Nanny was right after all in her wishes to use some of the stimulus bill for condom buying.
By Jose Antonio Vargas and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 15, 2009; A01
“At least 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a “generalized and severe” epidemic, according to a report scheduled to be released by health officials tomorrow.”
“That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 — or 15,120 — according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District’s HIV/AIDS office.”
“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”
“We have every mode of transmission” — men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use — “going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them,” Hader said.
“In addition to the epidemiology report, the city is also releasing a study on heterosexual behavior tomorrow. That report, funded by the CDC, was conducted by the George Washington University School of Health and Health Services.”
“Among its findings: Almost half of those who had connections to the parts of the city with the highest AIDS prevalence and poverty rates said they had overlapping sexual partners within the past 12 months, three in five said they were aware of their own HIV status, and three in 10 said they had used a condom the last time they had sex.”
Then again, we have to keep things in perspective: this is the same pseudo-commonwealth that has those liberal left wing pipe dream gun ban laws, yet still has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. To put that into perspective, DC had 46.4 murders per 100,000 people in 2007; right across the river in Arlington, it was 2.1 per 100,000. Good work liberals!
Regarding gun control, someone here mentioned that Georgia’s leaders are idiots. To many effects, I agree, especially when I see my state income tax go down the toilet and them having the audacity to even THINK of me paying even more. Anyway, every now and then they do something right. One such case in point was reported right here on the AJC regarding DC’s gun laws:
By BOB KEEFE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Washington — An economic meltdown, global warming, two wars and a new administration may be important stuff, but for Georgia’s congressional delegation, so is the right to have a gun.
Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson on Wednesday co-sponsored legislation that would give residents of the District of Columbia the right to possess handguns for the first time in more than 30 years.
The Washington, D.C., city council outlawed pistols, automatic weapons and high-capacity semiautomatic firearms in 1976 as a way to stem the city’s soaring gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban last year, but the city council is looking at ways to rewrite its local laws to keep restrictions on such guns.
Isakson and Chambliss’ legislation is attached to a bill that would give the district its first voting seat in the House. The Senate passed the voting bill Tuesday.
The right to have a pistol in Washington is simply a basic constitutional right, Chambliss said.
“Only a government that does not trust its citizens would refuse them the right to bear arms,” Chambliss said in a statement. “The right of Americans in every part of the country to own guns, whether for sport or protection, is clearly defined in the Constitution and must not be compromised.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Broun, an Athens Republican, announced Wednesday he was teaming up with Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) to establish a Second Amendment Task Force. The task force is necessary to “educate elected officials and the public on the necessity of the Second Amendment to maintaining our freedom and liberty,” Broun said in a statement.
Broun’s Washington office is known for the stuffed animals he bagged on safaris.
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Bill Shipp
March 15th, 2009
9:34 am
Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg 8:24 am
How much has the BMW plant cost South Carolina and what has the state of South Carolina get for their money?
More important how much has KIA cost Georgia and will we ever get our money back?
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Big Bucks GOP
March 15th, 2009
9:38 am
Doctor NO is on “Meet the Press” if this the best we have we just as well turn out the lights.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
9:43 am
“Since Wooten’s opinion is that tax money should be spread equally across Georgia, wouldn’t his essay be more appropriate if titled “Share the Wealth”?”
Ah yes, a typical mindless libtard at heart. Hate your fellow Americans because of what they believe, or more pertinent, WHERE they live, liberal left wing cave dweller.
BTW: There is a lot of rural poor white rednecks (I figured I’d save you the insult, pompous libtard) that votes Democrat. They sure keep sending Robert Byrd back to Washington from West Virginia.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
9:45 am
My God, that’s distressing news from D.C. How horrible. All the work and money we’ve poured into Africa and the Caribbean, and here the thing rears its head in our own nation’s capital.
For shame.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
9:48 am
Mr. Shipp:
“How much has the BMW plant cost South Carolina and what has the state of South Carolina get for their money? More important how much has KIA cost Georgia and will we ever get our money back?”
Oh I see how you libtards play. So, the fact that jobs are brought to these states is irrelevant. You must poor-mouth and lambaste them. Now you tell me, how much money was taken out of your paycheck last year for that Kia plant? Do you know? Do you care to fact find or do you just care to bucket lip everything that happens for the better that didn’t happen in your beloved northeastern or north midwestern socialist Utopia?
I’ll tell you this much, ace: It cost taxpayers a HELL of a lot less than the money we won’t be getting back from US auto manufacturer and bank bailouts under Obama.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
9:56 am
Back to guns, well, here’s one way Obama and the Nannycrats in Congress are helping parts of the economy: gun and ammunition sales – and you can take to the bank this hardware isn’t made in China. And this story is just from Oklahoma:
By KELLY BOSTIAN World Outdoors Writer
Published: 3/13/2009 3:28 AM
Last Modified: 3/13/2009 12:59 PM
“Four months after the election of President Barack Obama, firearms and ammunition sales in Tulsa remain at a fever pitch.”
“Popular self-protection ammunition is often sold out at local stores, weapons are flying off shelves and the state reports an 87 percent increase in concealed carry permit applications for February 2009 over February 2008.”
“People are hoarding. They’re creating a shortage,” Jim Prall at Sports World on 41st Street said of ammunition sales. “We’ve sold more ammunition in the last three months than we sold last year.”
“Gun sales spiked in November with the election of Barack Obama and Democrats adding to their majority in Congress. But local gun dealers say the spike is turning into a steady climb with political worries about gun rights as well as worries about the economy and potential for increased crime.”
“Prall said his store planned ahead for the increase, having seen a similar spike
after Bill Clinton was elected, but the previous jump in sales pales in comparison to what’s happening now.”
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
9:59 am
Here, Mr. Shipp, I did some fact finding for you on the Kia plant:
“Kia certainly found plenty of incentives in west Georgia. When the company announced plans for its auto plant in early 2006, it came after intense courting from state and local officials, who offered the company tax breaks and other incentives totaling more than $400 million.”
Now maybe you can explain to the rest of us how tax breaks come out of your pocket. Oh wait, we already know that you libtards on the left think that federal income tax breaks are stolen from the poor and “working class” and merely given to those evil rich.
Never mind.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
10:03 am
This HIV/AIDs ourbreak in DC is a goddam national scandal. It calls for immediate action by the Commander-in-Chief. I swear to God, when in doubt do what TR would do: send in the Marines. The President immediately should appoint a Colonel of the Corps as Surgeon General and instruct that person to crack whatever heads necessary to address the DC problem as first priority. Later, that person could take on advocacy of Stem Cell research, or whatever, as necessary.
Mop it up!
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Kamchak
March 15th, 2009
10:12 am
@ Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg:
“…coming down here to destroy our part of the nation…”
The war of northern aggression ended a century and a half ago, yet you still see carpetbaggers behind every tree. Is this the source of the digital, reactionary model through which you view the world? Do you enjoy the victimhood that is reinforced every day by Rush, Sean, Neil, Bill O, and little Billy K? You must, as evidenced in your delight in wallowing in it with every word you type.
What will THEY (the bad guys) do to YOU (the good guy)next?
“As a dog returns to its’ own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
10:17 am
Glenn: it’s rather amazing how the tune of the libtards in this nation changes when Democrats are in charge, no?
Kamhack: what’s a day without one of you pathetic liberal moonbats mentioning that what I say is taken from Rush/Hannity/Boortz/>insert neocon hater radio host here<. I thought you libtards said we right wingers were now irrelevant anyway. What happened? Idiot.
Now on to other news and back to hypocrisy of libtards, I’m sure everyone remembers the DNC mainstream media having a heyday over the Cheney F-bomb on a live mic. Well, it appears that Hair Plugs had a moment himself. Good luck watching the same DNC media have a heyday over this F-bomb:
Oh, That Joe! (No. 48 in a Series) — Gimme a Break
March 13, 2009 5:40 PM
At an event at Union Station today where Vice President Joe Biden was heralding the $1.3 billion in investments in rebuilding train stations and passenger rails, a microphone picked up one of the former senator’s myriad Senate colleagues addressing him, formally, as “Mr. Vice President.”
That met with Vice President Biden’s standard reply.
“Gimme a f*&$#ing break,” he said, apparently unaware that the microphone was on.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
10:19 am
And to Kamhack again: “The war of northern aggression ended a century and a half ago, yet you still see carpetbaggers behind every tree.”
Tell you what. You libtards stop bashing the South as if we still own slaves, and I’ll stop thinking of it as a separate region from the northeast, midwest, and west (which it IS the last time I looked at a map anyway).
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
10:31 am
Uh oh. What’s the Algore Global Warming priest going to do now? Oh wait, its now “Climate Change”. So, things being that cyclone/hurricane activity and energy is at a 30 year low (remember all the scaremongering from the Algore disciple moonbats after Katrina?). From an FSU study:
“Global and Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity [still] lowest in 30-years”
“Tropical cyclone (TC) activity worldwide has completely and utterly collapsed during the past 2 to 3 years with TC energy levels sinking to levels not seen since the late 1970s. As previously reported here and here at Climate Audit, and chronicled at my Florida State Global Hurricane Update page, both Northern Hemisphere and overall Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s. Even more astounding, when the Southern Hemisphere hurricane data is analyzed to create a global value, we see that Global Hurricane Energy has sunk to 30-year lows, at the least.”
Quick! We’ve got another crisis on our hands that needs US taxpayer dollars ASAP! It’s global cooling again just like it was when Jimmy Carter was about to start planning on running for president!
Another Ice Age?
Monday, Jun. 24, 1974
Time Magazine
“In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.”
“As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
10:39 am
Saw a GREAT Obama sticker:
“HONK if I’m paying your mortgage”
The “O” in it is that famous Obama “O” symbol in red, white, & blue. I gave the woman a big thumbs up and a wave – and yes, I was driving a much nicer car than her.
Remember, one of the Obama voters said this about her mortgage:
I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage…”
http://chicagoagainstobama.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/hope-obama-will-pay-my-mortgage-and-pay-for-my-gas/
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
11:21 am
Ah yes, those peaceful Muslims in Britain:
Minister beaten after clashing with Muslims on his TV show
By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 12:37 PM on 15th March 2009
A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’
The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu.
Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: ‘He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door.
He started slapping my face and punching my neck. He was trying to smash my head on the steering wheel.
Then he grabbed my cross and pulled it off and it fell on the floor. He was swearing. The other two men came from the car and took my laptop and Bible.’
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Kamchak
March 15th, 2009
11:46 am
I would never “bash the south” as I was born on Peachtree St.
Bored now…
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Chris Broe
March 15th, 2009
11:55 am
CNN just reported that the piece of space debris that almost took out the space station was actually an Iraqi Shoe. The man should get three years for this. Who are those guys? and who needs star wars? Is this like the low spark of high heeled boys? That Iraqi loafer just wanted to pump (slap) you up! That’s right Hanz. Ya. I cant end this riff. Somebody stop me.
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Jackie
March 15th, 2009
11:57 am
The US Business Council reported a study that said that if the US were in a 100-yard dash, we would be 23 yards behind. Our health care system does not provide the benefits for what is required to sustain it.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20090312/D96SEL5G0.html
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Chris Broe
March 15th, 2009
12:02 pm
Chris mathew’s tinkle down his leg: The basis of our contract law, especially for artists, contain the vestiges of the one sided legal abominations that formed the pound of flesh we exacted from each and every party of the first part during slavery. That’s why you have a better chance at getting knifed by the cast of Different Strokes or Full House than by a terrorists.
How about Cheney still taking pot shots about the imminent threat of another 911 without him being our defacto commander in chief? Cheney is a dangerous man. He’s actually goading the prospect of a WMD strike on US soil and then by conceding it, can set up partisan claims of a Democratic bungle on Defensive Posturing.
It really is a shame that Obama let Osama get away in 2002 in Afghanistan when we had him.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
12:32 pm
Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg @ 10:17:
Yes, it is.
Our President is a fraud.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
12:59 pm
“I would never “bash the south” as I was born on Peachtree St.”
Well Kamcheck, maybe you need to keep your fellow libtards in check then. Just an observation.
PoFo: “it really is a shame that Obama let Osama get away in 2002 in Afghanistan when we had him.”
You never disappoint in dullard off the wall colorful libtardism. BTW: exactly what in the HELL has your ilk in Congress – especially those Democrats that have been in charge of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2007 – been doing about Osama searching? How come we haven’t heard your beloved Nannycrats mouth off lately about not getting Osama not being found? How come we haven’t heard Obama talk about Osama?
Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
* Sudan offered up the terrorist and data on his network. The then-president and his advisors didn’t respond.
By MANSOOR IJAZ
LA Times
December 5, 2001
President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.
From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger and Sudan’s president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Iran’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.
As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster.
Realizing the growing problem with Bin Laden, Bashir sent key intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996.
The Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to “baby-sit” him–monitoring all his activities and associates.
But Saudi officials didn’t want their home-grown terrorist back where he might plot to overthrow them.
In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.
Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden’s personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.
Some of these men are now among the FBI’s 22 most-wanted terrorists.
The two men who allegedly piloted the planes into the twin towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader who managed Salim’s bank accounts and whose assets are frozen.
Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.
But U.S. authorities repeatedly turned the data away, first in February 1996; then again that August, when at my suggestion Sudan’s religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, wrote directly to Clinton; then again in April 1997, when I persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data; and finally in February 1998, when Sudan’s intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.
Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan’s data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they’d get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries–ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.
And that was not the end of it. In July 2000–three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen–I brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with Bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from one of the United States’ closest Arab allies–an ally whose name I am not free to divulge–approached me with the proposal after telling me he was fed up with the antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials.
The offer, which would have brought Bin Laden to the Arab country as the first step of an extradition process that would eventually deliver him to the U.S., required only that Clinton make a state visit there to personally request Bin Laden’s extradition. But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family–Clintonian diplomacy at its best.
Clinton’s failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger’s assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chairman of a New York-based investment company.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
1:04 pm
More for PoFo:
“How about Cheney still taking pot shots about the imminent threat of another 911 without him being our defacto commander in chief? Cheney is a dangerous man. He’s actually goading the prospect of a WMD strike on US soil”
He is warning us of taking the eye off the ball. Besides, exactly how different is that from your ilk like Dick Durbin and other Democrats who were hell bent in 2004-2007 or so in bad mouthing the Iraq war effort and sacrifice of our troops to the point of Osama bin Laden himself using their talking points?
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
1:39 pm
“Our health care system does not provide the benefits for what is required to sustain it.”
Well, 86% of this nation has a health care plan and for the most part, nobody is dying in the streets. I can’t wait for universal health care where I wait in a government line behind someone who has no life with a stubbed toe while I sit there bleeding from a pork butt knife cut all because said someone has the same access I do. Oh yeah, and good luck libtard socialists when you can’t sue a government employee in your “Free” health care for all for incompetence. Can’t wait!
Now moving on to more insanity of libtardism….
The mainstream DNC lib media in print has recently gotten one nostril out of the sand. They have discovered that they don’t give enough Conservative points and are actually producing more views from the alleged right. The AJC is only the latest example (and I’m not talking about Wooten or his replacement). But pertinent to this point, it’s the Washington Post’s token alleged neocon, Kathleen Parker. You have to remember that to a liberal, anyone to the right of them is a neocon, even if they are a centrist “Conservative” at best. So, my expectations for a newspaper to simply report the facts – rather than hide the truth or at best extrapolate the half truths – shows that I’m too ignorant to understand said newspapers’ perspective. Got it Kathleen. Thanks.
By Kathleen Parker
Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page A17
BOSTON — The biggest challenge facing America’s struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.
Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right.
Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh’s “drive-by media,” are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.
There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.
But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, the chorus of media bashing from certain quarters has succeeded in convincing many Americans that they don’t need newspapers. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently found that fewer than half of Americans — 43 percent — say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community “a lot.” Only 33 percent say they would miss the local paper if it were no longer available.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
2:01 pm
HONK! if I’m educating your kid…
Yeah, @@, I too am worried about Pakistan. Seems ripe for another strongman…maybe the same one…
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
2:04 pm
Hey Andy, d’ya mind if I steal your “Nannycrat” coinage? It’s great.
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Dusty
March 15th, 2009
2:12 pm
Dear C M Tingling Leg,
You are on a roll today. Thank goodness. I hadn’t seen Bill Shipp’s shot at the South. But I think you took care of that.
Glenn,
if Shipp is such a man of renoun why is he here raging away on a blog? Is that all he has to do?
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
2:56 pm
Hey Glenn, you can use any of my wordings. I don’t take much time in phrases when dealing with the libtard left. I just fire from the hip, so to speak. “Nannycrats” just kinda popped out there. It really is what it is thought, isn’t it? Sometimes I crack myself up – all at libtard expense of course. (PS: I’m not “Andy”).
Dusty: I’m about fed up with libtards treating the South as if we were still in the 1950s. Besides, it doesn’t take much brain muscle to expose the indefinite idiocy of liberalism.
And now, there is more for Sunday follies. Why is it only when Democrats run Washington that the communists feel they have to flex their muscle and be belligerent?
Report: Cuba, Venezuela could host Russian bombers
By DAVID NOWAK, Asssociated Press Writer David Nowak, Asssociated Press Writer – Sat Mar 14, 3:38 pm ET
MOSCOW – A Russian air force chief said Saturday that the country could base some strategic bombers in Cuba or on an island offered by Venezuela, the Interfax news agency reported, but a Kremlin official quickly said the military had been speaking only hypothetically.
The U.S. and Russia have been trying to reset their relationship, severely strained over U.S. plans to position missile defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic and by Russia’s invasion of U.S. ally Georgia last year.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
3:19 pm
Well thank you, Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg, for your “Nannycrats”, a term I shall immediately flourish with abandon. It seems that I should have been using it, lo, these past thirty years. I seem to have been destined since the mid-’70s to piss on the shoes of those who would control other people’s children, and “Nannycrats” so aptly describes those wearing the shoes.
It’s interesting, what you say about shooting from the hip as you blog. I suppose that’s the best form for blogging, but I do wonder how lethal you must be when you actually bother to compose.
I’m reading Fred Kaplan’s new book on Lincoln, the subtitle of which is, “A Biography of a Writer”. It’s what I was taught to think of Lincoln: Genus Stylist. Kaplan argues really well that words — honest, fitting, accessible words — meant everything to Lincoln, so much so that they willed him into being. Into being better. Always better.
Lincoln was great guns for better, ever better, and the betterment of everyone.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
3:22 pm
Oh Dusty, that’s so impolite that it cannot be the real you…
Why, are you a candidate for Jim’s job?
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
3:23 pm
Russia can go to hell. I do not understand why we tarry in that process.
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Glenn
March 15th, 2009
3:35 pm
Three elderly English clubmen in their cups took the last train home. Passing their compartment, the Cockney conductor announced, “Wembley! Next stop: Wembley Station!”
The first gentleman, lifting his drooling chin from his waistcoat, asked, “Wembley?”
The second replied, “No, Thursd’y.”
Said the third, “So am I…so let’s get off and (urp)…have a drink!”
With that I bid you adieu…
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Bill Shipp
March 15th, 2009
3:43 pm
Chris Matthew’s Tingling Leg 9:59 am
You’ll be rich if you can patent what you are smoking..
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
3:54 pm
“You’ll be rich if you can patent what you are smoking..”
Ah, well Mr. “Shipp,” I must say that I admire you for at least saying SOMETHING in retort. That’s better than most libtards I deal with who usually just retort with “you are angry and full of hate.” Thanks for being one step above a cockroach.
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Dusty
March 15th, 2009
3:55 pm
Dear Glenn,
I see you are in your teachery coaching mood today. I am not impolite. I asked most politely WHY IS BILL SHIPP, a professional liberal journalist, wasting time on a conservative blog of little importance??? I consider all blogs to be of little importance but fun occasionally.
NO, I am not a candidate for Jim’s job. I wouldn’t want to make those AJC decider editors laugh. They might want to send me to California. See, I did not say… where all the nuts and naughty go. That would be impolite but appallingly honest.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
4:04 pm
The future of America:
ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2009) — Are Americans flunking science? A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive® reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test. …
According to the national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences:
* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
Yet the majority of these people are “smart” enough to know that Obama is the greatest thing to happen to this nation. Ever.
Pathetic.
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Get Real
March 15th, 2009
4:07 pm
Wooten is a complete fraud. Previous posts that he’s made say that Buckhead and North Fulton should secede from their counterparts because they pay more in taxes than most in the City of Atlanta and South Fulton. He’s a cherry-picker at best, and a two-faced liar at worst.
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Dusty
March 15th, 2009
4:10 pm
Get Real…..get lost…..
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sl3
March 15th, 2009
4:11 pm
I thought this is about dirt? I consider myself a moderate and agree with many of Wooten’s opinions, but I am not on board with this one. Living in N. Fulton we are paying the highest property taxes in the state because we pay like 15% of our property tax to Grady Hospital which is used by about everybody that has no insurance. How much is that county in south Ga paying towards Calhoun Memorial? I doubt anybody in the state gets reemed as much as N. Fulton taxpayers. Without the metro Atlanta economic engine this state would be broke and state legislators should be helping out a little more than they do.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
4:14 pm
“WASHINGTON (AP) – The Obama administration is abandoning one of President George W. Bush’s key phrases in the war on terrorism: enemy combatant. In court filings Friday, the Justice Department said it will no longer use the term to justify holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.”
Oh I see. More liberal euphamisms. No, wait, let’s just let everyone in Gitmo go free. They’re all innocent civilians from Cheney’s holocaustic made up war. So how many “detainees” released from Gitmo to return to the battle front against the West does this make?
Officials: New Taliban chief was once at Gitmo
Operation officer was released to the Afghan government in 2007
updated 9:20 p.m. ET, Tues., March. 10, 2009
WASHINGTON – The Taliban’s new top operations officer in southern Afghanistan had been a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the latest example of a freed detainee who took a militant leadership role and a potential complication for the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison.
U.S. authorities handed over the detainee to the Afghan government, which in turn released him, according to Pentagon and CIA officials.
Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, formerly Guantanamo prisoner No. 008, was among 13 Afghan prisoners released to the Afghan government in December 2007. Rasoul is now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a nom de guerre that Pentagon and intelligence officials say is used by a Taliban leader who is in charge of operations against U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
4:19 pm
“Living in N. Fulton we are paying the highest property taxes in the state because we pay like 15% of our property tax to Grady Hospital which is used by about everybody that has no insurance…I doubt anybody in the state gets reemed as much as N. Fulton taxpayers.”
sl3: did you miss my post on 3/14 at 11:02am here on said topic? I agree with your post wholeheartedly, by the by. But you need to tread carefully on what you post. Stuck on stupid 1960s liberals here will read in between your lines and call you a racist if you trash talk your tax dollars going to Grady.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
4:20 pm
“Wooten is a complete fraud.”
Typical mindless libtard. When they have nothing to say, they just sling feces.
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Chris Matthew's Tingling Leg
March 15th, 2009
4:30 pm
Don’t look now, but a California bred moonbat is about to be released . Don’t you just love liberal euphemisms such as “counter culture” to describe domestic TERRORISTS?
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – A saga that began in the violent cauldron of California’s 1970s radical counterculture and took a dramatic turn into a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Minnesota is about to come to an end.
Sara Jane Olson, who was a fugitive for a quarter-century after attempting to kill Los Angeles police officers and participating in a deadly bank robbery near Sacramento as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, is scheduled to be released from a California prison next week.
One bomb, packed with nails, failed to explode as Hall and his partner drove away from a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Division on an August night. A similar unexploded device was found under another police car miles away.
“That bomb should have gone off that night,” Hall said. “I would have been just one of many people that would have been dead. It just brings up a lot of anger knowing that she’s going to be released.”
Hall recalls that a girl about 8 years old was watching from the restaurant.
“That little girl was waving at us as we drove off. If that bomb would have gone off, she would have been killed along with her family,” said Hall, who served 31 years with the department. “I haven’t forgiven her (Olson) in the least for what she’s done and what she could have done to many more innocent people.”
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williewonka
March 15th, 2009
5:20 pm
Dusty…I realize you’re pretty simply minded! However to think that Bill Shipp is actually blogging here at Wootens corner is really going beyond the pale……