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Latest Articles: Editorial
Politicians Without Roots - The Candidates from Nowhere
Post Date: 2008-04-16 19:55:54 by Dakmar
9 Comments
The last three major-party presidential candidates standing have this in common: the state abbreviations after their names--John McCain (AZ), Hillary Clinton (NY), and Barack Obama (IL)--are no more meaningful than the random pairings of letters in a spoonful of alphabet soup. These are the candidates from nowhere. Or in Obama's case, from everywhere. And this rootlessness has policy consequences. Senator John McCain is a poster boy for the pathologies of the military brat. Born in the Panama Canal Zone, he attended twenty schools in his nomadic childhood. "The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi," is how he shuts up critics of his carpetbagging, but he is making ...
Morbidly Obese Economy
Post Date: 2008-04-16 19:36:22 by James Deffenbach
2 Comments
What We Learn Won't Help Obama
Post Date: 2008-04-16 15:26:55 by RickyJ
4 Comments
As the Obama rocket flames out and plummets back to earth, it is useful to recall how extraordinary it has been. Before the Iowa caucuses, almost everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the nomination easily. She had the support of blue collar workers and most party insiders, and an enormous war chest. If ever there were a prohibitive favorite, it was she. And Sen. Clinton did dispose quickly of three candidates with more impressive resumes than hers (Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico). But until "Bittergate" erupted last weekend, she was losing the nomination to a tyro senator whose most important resume tic ...
Quote of the Day
Post Date: 2008-04-15 14:38:47 by Peppa
0 Comments
Quote of the Day In Canada, writing about the gun registry, Pierre Dupont gets it right: "Gun control is the only kind of policy that we have where the proponents of it will point to its utter failure as evidence that we need even more of it."
OBAMA NATION
Post Date: 2008-04-15 13:04:17 by IndieTX
18 Comments
Election 2008: Is Barack Obama's small-town America really a land of bitter gun-toting, Bible-thumping racists? Or are they just God-fearing American patriots? Maybe we should ask his "typical white" grandmother. Read More: Election 2008 Many pundits call it a gaffe, but we see Barack Obama's remarks to a bunch of San Francisco Democrats about small town people in Pennsylvania as a revelation. The remarks of our first "post-racial" presidential candidate go a long way towards explaining how he could listen to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright talk about the "United States of White America" for two decades. Meeting privately with a group of donors in ...
Taxation Under the Pharaohs and Today
Post Date: 2008-04-15 08:02:22 by DeaconBenjamin
1 Comments
On this, the 15th day of April, 2008, it does not hurt to do a brief comparison between the Bible's account of the tyranny of Egypt and our own democratically elected taskmasters. The story of Joseph in Egypt is the story of how the people of Egypt came under the tyranny of a king who claimed divinity for himself. The biblical text does not say that this Pharaoh made such a claim, but we know from historical texts that the pharaoh was regarded as a divine-human link. When he died, he was believed to journey to the realm of the gods. He was the official source of meaning in the cosmos. He was also responsible for allocating scarce economic resources for the benefit of the State. The ...
Icelandic bank failures could sink us
Post Date: 2008-04-15 01:44:35 by ...
3 Comments
I've been watching a slow motion implosion since last August that began with the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds. We're definitely on track for something like the Great Depression, only long and financially painful. I think we get knocked back to a 1940 standard of living very shortly and we're going to have to fight to hang on to that in the face of peak oil. We here in the U.S. associate the year 1929 with the beginning of the Great Depression but the roots of it really took hold in 1931 with the collapse of the Austrian banking system. Today we face some definitely scary parallels with what is happening in Iceland. Little Iceland, population 315,000, could knock the ...
Bitter bumpkins take note!
Post Date: 2008-04-14 23:10:09 by RickyJ
6 Comments
So let's get this straight: If you are a gun-supporting, God-worshiping, secure-the-border type who feels unfair trade regulations are killing American manufacturing, Barack Obama doesn't just respectfully disagree with you. After all, you can't respectfully disagree with someone you have utter contempt for. No, he thinks you're nothing but a sour-grapes, behind-the-times, racist, gun-and-Bible-toting nutcase. In short, you're just a bunch of bitter, bigoted bumpkins. You have to wonder: Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright writing Obama's sermons now? One supposes that you could offend more people in one fell swoop than Obama did with his recent recitation of ...
Forget Petraeus, Bring Sadr to Washington
Post Date: 2008-04-13 23:26:07 by robin
0 Comments
Look, no one is doubting Petraeus' skill as a general. Seems to be the best guy we've got. He's the man. He's Zeus. We all agree. And maybe things would be much better now if he'd been in charge from the start. But if we need to suspend troop withdrawals because the surge strategy is working, as John McCain would have us believe, why did violence spike the instant Sadr dropped his ceasefire pledge, then relax when he told his fighters to stand down, then jump up again after that broke down, etc? Let's face it: the amount of violence is more dependent on the Sadr ceasefire, as well as the agreement we've got with the Sunni tribes (who we're paying off), than ...
The Ethanol Fallacy: Op-Ed
Post Date: 2008-04-13 20:08:55 by farmfriend
0 Comments
The Ethanol Fallacy: Op-Ed America needs smart alternative to oil, but the just-passed energy bill puts too much emphasis on the wrong alternative, PM's editor-in-chief says. By James B. Meigs Published in the February 2008 issue The idea is so appealing: We can reduce our dependence on oil—stop sending U.S. dollars to corrupt petro-dictators, stop spewing megatons of carbon into the atmos¬phere—by replacing it with clean, home-grown, all-American corn. It sounds too good to be true. Sadly, it is. Of course we need alternatives to oil. The world uses a cubic mile of petroleum each year, and demand keeps rising as the global economy booms. At first glance, corn seems ...
April … May Well Be the Cruellest Month [....or light at the end of a very dark tunnel?]
Post Date: 2008-04-13 16:02:02 by AllTheKings'HorsesWontDoIt
6 Comments
April … May Well Be the Cruellest Month Smoking Mirrors – April 4, 2008 The clock is ticking. The second hand spins. The minute hand slides and the hour hand crawls. Hours become days. Days become weeks and months and years. Within the spectrum of passing time, all that we know has happened, is happening and will happen. Is there any one of us who has not said to themselves, as they look back on their life; “How did I get here?” Have we not all wondered what might have been, had we not taken that fork in the road, had we not hesitated at one point or rushed impulsively forth at another? We’ve all been there. This dream-stuff out of which our lives are woven is a ...
What if foreigners quit lending the US so much money?
Post Date: 2008-04-12 23:20:05 by Old Friend
0 Comments
One of the bugaboos of the financial doom-and-gloom crowd is the worry that foreigners (China in particular, but also oil exporting countries in the Middle-East, and others) might quit buying so many US Treasury securities. If that happened, they say, the value of the dollar would plummet, interest rates would soar, and the US economy would be in terrible trouble. I say: Bring it on! I'm not the only person who isn't worried about this. Quite a few people take some comfort in the idea that dumping Treasury paper would hurt the major foreign holders worst of all, and that they'd never shoot themselves in the foot that way. The doomsters retort that, given the inflation rate, ...
Largest U.S. Municipal Bankruptcy Looms in Alabama
Post Date: 2008-04-12 16:59:27 by RickyJ
2 Comments
April 11 (Bloomberg) -- They're talking more about Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in Jefferson County, Alabama, the home of the largest city in the state, Birmingham. Who can blame them? The county is now being whipsawed by an ill-thought-out debt policy and the collapse of the bond insurers. Credit-rating downgrades all around have triggered a series of events that are no longer in the county's control, leaving it at the mercy of securities firms that have little room for maneuver themselves. This has produced a steady series of stories in my new favorite newspaper, the Birmingham News, all about how the county is preparing to declare bankruptcy any day. Perhaps the best ...
Anybody have any experience with Swiss bank accounts??
Post Date: 2008-04-11 12:59:08 by X-15
3 Comments
I've been reading and they have advantages and disadvantages: good way to evade taxes (legal under SWISS law, which is only concerned with tax fraud), but are subject to 35% tax which can be refunded with a document from your local taxing authority (IRS), which kinda defeats the purpose of a Swiss bank account. Anybody have any practical experience?? I'm looking to park a "sum" of money long-term to evade taxation and to keep from going through local banks, who roll over for the IRS at the drop of the hat.
Give me Sanctuary from the New World Disorder
Post Date: 2008-04-11 10:01:40 by christine
6 Comments
Apparently Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has his knickers in a twist because of the Fed’s crack-down here and there on established businesses in L.A. to find illegal aliens. The L.A. times just reported that ICE has made 4,900 arrests in the work place, nationwide since 2007. This is dramatically more than during 2001. Apparently workers are being picked-up at various manufacturing plants and businesses in a random sort of way who are suspected of being illegal aliens. The Mayor has asked ICE to instead focus on bad employers who don’t play by “the rules” because so many business raids, in L.A. especially, are hurting business.
What Villaraigosa is really saying is that his tax ...
Obama's Switcheroo [WSJ editorial whining in a funny way]
Post Date: 2008-04-11 07:12:44 by a vast rightwing conspirator
0 Comments
Obama's Switcheroo April 11, 2008; Page A16 Barack Obama declared this week that he has created a "parallel public financing system." Come again? Let him explain: Under parallel public financing, "the American people decide if they want to support a campaign, they can get on the Internet and finance it." Up to this moment, "public" financing has meant taking money from the federal government for the general Presidential election. Senator Obama's new system is public, because "the public" sends him the money. [Barack Obama] Here's the translation: In November, Mr. Obama said he would accept public financing for the general campaign if ...
Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China
Post Date: 2008-04-10 21:00:34 by robin
5 Comments
Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China By F. William Engdahl Global Research, April 10, 2008 Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing’s by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil companies are developing ...
The World Food Crisis
Post Date: 2008-04-10 17:07:44 by angle
21 Comments
Most Americans take food for granted. Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. They are in trouble. Last year, the food import bill of developing countries rose by 25 percent as food prices rose to levels not seen in a generation. Corn doubled in price over the last two years. Wheat reached its highest price in 28 years. The increases are already sparking unrest from Haiti to Egypt. Many countries have imposed price controls on food or taxes on agricultural exports. Last week, the ...
What I Believe: Washington as Dangerous as Brussels
Post Date: 2008-04-10 15:03:26 by X-15
4 Comments
Ten years ago, I was vehemently pro-American. Like many British Conservatives (I use the capital ‘C’ deliberately, to denote supporters of The Conservative Party), I regarded the United States as almost the ideal society. More importantly, and also like many Conservatives, I regarded any questioning of the Anglo-American alliance as a taboo which was broken only by those whose views were dangerously and irredeemably left-wing. I believed that the main threat to my values came from the quasi-socialist political tradition of the European continent (a subject on which I wrote a book) and that the “Atlantic community” was the right response to, and defence from, that threat. ...
USA: Condoleeza trying to get Mandela and ANC off Terrorist organization list
Post Date: 2008-04-10 14:13:04 by X-15
2 Comments
Submitted by Martyn: Hi Jan, Condoleeza Rice is trying to get Nelson Mandela and the ANC off the list of Terrorist organisations. If that happens it just gives the ANC licence to do what they want and legitimises the policies of the party. Condi obviously sees the ANC as part of the "Brotherhood". Along with that the acting chairman of the House Committee Howard Berman, plans to pass a bill in the senate legitimising the ANC. He passed the bill in the 80's originally that banned the ANC. I am asking if you could ask your contacts to send letters to Mr. Berman not to unban them. Thanks 2170 Rayburn House office Building, Washington, DC 20515, United States of America
BBC: Imperial Tool
Post Date: 2008-04-10 06:13:43 by Stephen Lendman
1 Comments
BBC: Imperial Tool - by Stephen Lendman At a time of growing public disenchantment with the major media, millions now rely on alternate sources. Many online and print ones are credible. One of the world's most relied on is not - the BBC. It's an imperial tool, as corrupted as its dominant counterparts, been around longer than all of them, now in it for profit, and it's vital that people know who BBC represents and what it delivers. It was close but not quite the world's first broadcaster. Other European nations claim the distinction along with KDKA Pittsburgh as the oldest US one. BBC's web site states: "The British Broadcasting Company Ltd (its original name) was ...
Smear Of Ben Stein's Film 'Expelled' Already Begun [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2008-04-09 19:49:47 by Horse
74 Comments
The big guns are coming out already. This scorching is by Roger Friedman. Notice how he puts his own beliefs in wrapped up as "conventionally accepted Darwinism. " Ben Stein: Win His Career By Roger Friedman After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central's Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career. Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely "character" for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," is released. Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, ...
Remember: They Are Liars
Post Date: 2008-04-09 07:56:31 by angle
8 Comments
No one is such a liar as the indignant man.- Friedrich Nietzsche George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now. They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, "enough to kill several million people," according to a page on the White House web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein. They lied. They claimed Iraq was in possession of 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. They lied. They claimed Iraq was in possession of 500 tons, which equals 1,000,000 pounds, of ...
Destroying Public Education in America
Post Date: 2008-04-07 06:16:37 by Stephen Lendman
0 Comments
Destroying Public Education in America - by Stephen Lendman Diogenes called education "the foundation of every state." Education reformer and "father of American education" Horace Mann went even further. He said: "The common school (meaning public ones) is the greatest discovery ever made by man." He called it the "great equalizer" that was "common" to all, and as Massachusetts Secretary of Education founded the first board of education and teacher training college in the state where the first (1635) public school was established. Throughout the country today, privatization schemes target them and threaten to end a 373 year tradition. ...
What Obama Could Have Said About His Pastor Rev. Wright, a True Patriot [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2008-04-06 07:01:57 by Zoroaster
64 Comments
Subscribe Online Weekend Edition Apri1 5 / 6, 2008 What Obama Could Have Said About His Pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot By LAWRENCE KORB and IAN MOSS In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's challenge to, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines. In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.) The man did so well in corpsman school that he ...
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