two questions...forget who's the leader of the Republican Party...the real question should be...who's in charge of the Democratic Party ?...think about it...Obama reads everything off a teleprompter...so...who's writing it ?...

the other question is straight from Rush's Friday show...transcripts please...I'll let Rush ask the question...like only he can...

" Is This What You Voted For ? "

RUSH: Let's go back to Election Day, 11/4/08. That was the day of hope. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9625. At this moment, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering around 6580. It is down over 3,000 points. That means that just since November the 4th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost a third of its value, $3 trillion of wealth has been wiped out. Is this what you voted for? A record 31.8 million Americans receive food stamps at the latest count. That is an increase of 700,000 people in one month with the United States in recession. These are government figures. Food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries and People magazine and Pop Tarts are the major US anti-hunger program forecast to cost at least $51 billion in this fiscal year ending September 30th. That's up $10 billion from 2008. So we have 31.8 million Americans on food stamps. Is that what you voted for? The new government unemployment figure is out today, and it is 8.1%, over 600,000 jobs lost last month. "The nation's unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the highest since late 1983, as cost-cutting employers slashed 651,000 jobs." Is this what you voted for?

Funny thing is, that if democrats weren't just as crooked as republicans, they wouldn't be trying to pack this bill full of pork. And they wouldn't be trying to attack the republicans for being conservative. They would also give people a chance to read the 800 page document instead of pulling a G.W. and trying to shove it down people's throats before the plan can be thought through.

Instead you would see a simplified document that states a clear cut plan, no pork added, and here's the kicker, IT WOULD MAKE SENSE!

At least this is my opinion....

A few Republican Governors, not many but some, are planning on rejecting the stimulus money destined for their States.Money meant for things like extended unemployment benefits.

Brian Schweitzer, Gov of Montana and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley dismissed GOP detractors as "fringe" Republicans eager to score political points.

How do you feel about it?
Is your state one of the few with a stubborn Governor planning on rejecting the help?

The American Economy Is Not Coming Back

President Barack Obama and his economic team are being careful to couch all their talk about economic stimulus programs and bank bailout programs in warnings that the economic downturn is serious and that it will take considerable time to bounce back.

I’m reminded of an experience I had with Chinese medicine when I was living in Shanghai back in 1992. I had come down with a nasty case of the flu while teaching journalism at Fudan University on a Fulbright Scholar program. A Chinese colleague suggested I go to the university clinic. When I told him there wasn’t much point since doctors couldn’t do much for the flu besides recommend fluids and bed rest, he said, “That’s Western doctors. You could go to the Chinese medicine doctors at the clinic. They can help you.” I figured, what the hell, and we went. The doctor inquired into the lurid details of my illness—how my bowel movements looked, the color of the mucus in my nose, etc. He didn’t really examine me physically. Then he prescribed an incredible number of pills and teas and sent me home with a huge bag of stuff, and instructions on the regimen for taking them through the course of each day. I followed the directions dutifully, and my colleague came by each day to check on my progress. By the fifth day, when I was still running a fever and feeling terrible, I told him I didn’t think the Chinese medicine was working. He replied confidently, “Chinese medicine takes a long time to work.”

I laughed at this. “Sure,” I said. “But the flu only lasts a week or so, and now, when I get better, you’ll say it was the Chinese medicine, right?”

He smiled and agreed. “Yes. You are right.”

Obviously the Obama administration recognizes that it needs to keep the finger of blame for the current economic collapse squarely pointed at the Bush administration, which is certainly fair in large part (though the Clinton deregulation of the banking industry played a major part in the financial crisis and its enthusiastic promotion of globalization began the massive shift of jobs overseas that has left the nation’s productive capacity hollowed out). But it also seems to recognize that it cannot tell the bitter truth, which is that our national economy will never “bounce back” to where it was in 2007.

America, and individual Americans, have been living profligately for years in an unreal economy, propped up by easy credit which inflated the value of real estate to incredible levels, and which led people to spend way beyond their means. Ordinary middle-class working people have been encouraged to buy obscenely oversized homes at 5% down, or even no down payment. They have been lured into buying cars the size of trucks, one for each driving-aged member of the family (in our town, so many high school kids drive to school that the school ran out of parking spaces and the yellow school buses, largely empty on their runs, are referred to by the students as the “shame train,” an embarrassment to be seen riding). They’ve installed individual back-yard swimming pools, unwilling to share the water with their neighbors in community pools. Boring faux ethnic restaurant franchises of all kinds have befouled the landscape, filling up with families too stressed out to cook, and willing to endure over-salted, over-priced and tasteless cuisine and tacky plastic décor night after night.

Now this is all crashing down. Property values are in free-fall. Car sales have fallen off a cliff. Joblessness is soaring (At present, it’s approaching an official rate of 8%, but if the methodology used in 1980, before the Reagan administration changed it to hide the depth of that era’s deep recession, were applied, it would be 17% today, or one in seven workers).

Eventually, the economic slide will hit bottom and begin its slow climb back, as all recessions do, but there will be no return to the days of $500,000 McMansion developments, three-car garages and a new car every two or three years for both parents plus a car for each highschooler. Not only will banks no longer be able to offer such credit to clients. People, having been burned, will not be willing to borrow so much. Company health care benefits, pension programs or 401(k) matching programs that were slashed during this downturn will not be restored when the economy picks up again.

Over the last 20 years, America has degenerated into a nation of consumers, with 72 percent of Gross Domestic Product (sic) now being accounted for by consumer spending—most of it going for things that are produced overseas and shipped here.

That is not an economic model that is sustainable, and it is a model that has just suffered what is certainly a mortal blow.

What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a recovery at all. Eventually, productive capacity will be restored, as lowered US wages make it again profitable for some things to be made here at home again, but like people in the 1930s looking back at the Roaring 20s of yore, we are going to look back at the last two decades as some kind of dream.

It would be better if the new administration would be honest about this, because with honesty, we could have a recovery program that would actually address the real critical issues facing the country—the decline of our educational system, the irrationality of official promotion of home ownership that has led to the proliferation not just of suburbs but of exurbs, the over-reliance on the automobile for transportation, the unprecedented waste of resources, the pillaging of the environment, not to mention the decimation of the retirement system and the creation of a vast medical-industrial complex that is sucking the life-blood out of families and businesses alike.

With honesty, we could also confront the other big obstacle to national recovery—the nation’s obsession with militarism and foreign wars. The honest truth is that the US is technically bankrupt and in a state of chronic decline, and yet the nation persists in spending a trillion dollars a year on war and preparations for war, as though America were in mortal danger from foreign enemies.

The truth is that we are not threatened by Communism, by drug lords, or by Muslim Jihadists in any serious way. Rather, we have become our own worst enemy.

The administration could start by telling us all this straight up, but the problem is, most of us probably don’t want to hear it, which explains why we’re not hearing it. It also explains why we’re about to blow another trillion or so dollars on propping up failing banks, funding pointless highway and bridge construction, and blowing up illiterate peasants in remote places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

http://www.countercurrents.org/lindorff310109.htm

With all the billions spent on the whole war on terrorism and on war itself, since 2001, and all the billions of the FIRST bail out , and now all the billions expectes for the new "stimulus" it seems there are no limits to the amount of financial paper (or rather electronic)exchanges that allow banks to make bookkeeping entries adding deposits and 'reserve' to their books.

What exactly or even a guess, is the limit of the amount the Fed can authorize? Why can't they keep pumping it out indefinately? After all, at this particular point how long would it take at current taxation levels to continue to pay 'normal' Federal annual entitlements AND PAY BACK the 'loans' that the Fed got out of thin air?

I'm so confused? Ignorant, yes - enlighten me.

Should 'Buy American' be part of the stimulus bill? Results
Q. A "Buy American" clause in the $900B stimulus package allows, with some exceptions, only U.S.-made materials and goods to be used in projects funded by the bill.

Do you think a "Buy American" clause should be included in the stimulus bill?

Yes. With a few exceptions, all steel, iron, or manufactured goods used in a stimulus-funded project should be made in the U.S.A. 82%
No. There should be no import restrictions placed on such projects. 15%
Not sure/No opinion 3%

30103 votes

Damn!!!!

The War in Iraq Costs
$592,584,112,250.00
and its going up...........

$4,681 per household.
$1,721 per person.
$341.4 million per day.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home


Think of that this way,,
Thats about $1,260,817.26 per dead American soldier! My Brothers....

Is that cost more suitable to your palate??

Their plan will add $6700.00 in new debt to each American Household. For each each job thier plan might produce, it will cost $214,000. The bill is all spending programs to pay off campiagn debts. They were forced to remove money for contraceptives and refurbishment of the "Mall of America."

Check out the entire plan @ stimulus.org



Pissed off American that doesn't want to see future generations saddled with debt!!!!!!!!!!!!!

woohoooooooo !!!...


Barack Obama's pork-stuffed $825 billion stimulus bill passed the House this evening, but it didn't gain a single vote of support from the GOP.

Not a one.

The Republicans complete unwillingness to vote for the bill is a blow to the new President, who spent a considerable amount of time on Capitol Hill this week lobbying for votes.

Obama failed miserably. The controversial spending package passed entirely with Democratic votes.

11 Democrats crossed party lines to oppose the bill with Republicans, which has prompted the the GOP to tell media, "the only bipartisanship was in opposition to this bill," as Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) in a statement.

It should be noted that the new House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R.-Va.), who is in charge of corralling and as his title dictates, whipping votes, surely played lead role in this feat.

Now the bill will be sent to the Senate, where Obama said he'd like to see 80 senators vote for the bill. That may be difficult. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to be following the House GOP's lead. He issued a statement after the House vote titled "Bipartisan rejection of a partisan plan."

woohoooooooo !!!...


Barack Obama's pork-stuffed $825 billion stimulus bill passed the House this evening, but it didn't gain a single vote of support from the GOP.

Not a one.

The Republicans complete unwillingness to vote for the bill is a blow to the new President, who spent a considerable amount of time on Capitol Hill this week lobbying for votes.

Obama failed miserably. The controversial spending package passed entirely with Democratic votes.

11 Democrats crossed party lines to oppose the bill with Republicans, which has prompted the the GOP to tell media, "the only bipartisanship was in opposition to this bill," as Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) in a statement.

It should be noted that the new House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R.-Va.), who is in charge of corralling and as his title dictates, whipping votes, surely played lead role in this feat.

Now the bill will be sent to the Senate, where Obama said he'd like to see 80 senators vote for the bill. That may be difficult. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to be following the House GOP's lead. He issued a statement after the House vote titled "Bipartisan rejection of a partisan plan."

That's how I understood it, I didn't see it as a racist remark at all, I have said it in another thread.
Bush's legacy is Obama. People hate him so much, they were willing to give a black man a chance.

ta-kill-ya?

I am sorry but that's a scary drink.

I never feel drunk if I drink it...I just do stupid **** like fall off the front porch!!

HEY!! Who moved the steps???

Besides it has a skunky after taste.

Give me a home brew or two, some good whisky, a pot of stew, some cards, musical instruments, music, pillows, snackage, a fire, a stocked fridge and good company...

Pile up like puppies, talk, laugh, walk in the woods...

Perfect weekend...so when are you all coming over? hehe

by Paul Krugman

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. "I don't believe that anybody is above the law," he responded, but "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
I'm sorry, but if we don't have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years - and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama's remarks to mean that we won't - this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don't face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let's be clear what we're talking about here. It's not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation's security. The fact is that the Bush administration's abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for "right-thinking Americans" - their term, not mine - and there's strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq - an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security - in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let's also not forget that country's failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There's much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years - in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn't we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn't there be some penalty for the Bush administration's politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we're told that we don't have to dwell on past abuses, because we won't repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration's political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won't do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we've already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it's giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off - which isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it's true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we'll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it's probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he's going to swear to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." That's not a conditional oath to be honored only when it's convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that's not a decision he has the right to make.

© 2009 The New York Times
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/16-5

EASTON, Pa. – A supermarket is defending itself for refusing to a write out 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell's name on his birthday cake. Deborah Campbell, 25, of nearby Hunterdon County, N.J., said she phoned in her order last week to the Greenwich ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son's name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.

Karen Meleta, a ShopRite spokeswoman, said the store denied similar requests from the Campbells the last two years, including a request for a swastika.

"We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate," Meleta said. "We considered this inappropriate."

The Campbells ultimately got their cake decorated at a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania, Deborah Campbell said Tuesday.

A Wal-Mart spokesman told The Associated Press on Wednesday that in light of the incident, the company would review its guidelines regarding cake decorations and other requests.

"It's clear that in serving this customer, some people were offended," spokesman Greg Rossiter said. "As a result, we're going to review our policies."

Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name."

The Campbells' two other children are named JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, who turns 2 in a few months, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, who will be 1 in April.

Campbell said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.

"Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That's fine, I don't really care," he said. "That's his choice."

He said about 12 people attended the birthday party Sunday, including several children of mixed race.

Browner: Redder Than Obama Knows

Steven Milloy
Junk Science
Friday, Jan 16, 2009

Incoming White House energy-environment czar Carol Browner was recently discovered to be a commissioner in Socialist International. While that revelation has been ignored by the mainstream media and blithely dismissed by her supporters, you may soon be paying the cost of Browner’s political beliefs in your electricity bill.

Socialist International is precisely what it sounds like — a decidedly anti-capitalistic political cause. Founded in 1951, its organizing document rails against capitalism, asserting that it “has been incapable of satisfying the elementary needs of the world’s population … unable to function without devastating crises and mass unemployment … produced social insecurity and glaring contrasts between rich and poor … [and] resorted to imperialist expansion and colonial exploitation.…” Socialist International also asserts, “In some countries, powerful capitalist groups helped the barbarism of the past to raise its head again in the form of Fascism and Nazism.” So Socialist International at least partly blames Adolph Hitler on capitalism.

According to its own principles, Socialist International favors the nationalization of industry, is skeptical of the benefits of economic growth and wants to establish a more “equitable international economic order.” In true Marxist form, it asserts that, “The concentration of economic power in few private hands must be replaced by a different order in which each person is entitled — as citizen, consumer or wage-earner — to influence the direction and distribution of production, the shaping of the means of production, and the conditions of working life.”

There’s much more in Socialist International’s principles, but you get the idea.

So what does all this have to do with your electricity bill? In late-December, Carbon Control News reported that Browner was a “strong backer” of utility “decoupling,” which had emerged as a “key climate policy priority for Obama.”

What is utility decoupling? The profits of electric utility companies have traditionally depended on the amount of electricity sold; basically, the more power that is sold, the more profit that is earned. The productivity-profitability link is a logical and standard business principle that is easy to understand, easy to implement and that has worked for, well, millennia in myriad business ventures — but no more for electric utilities, if Browner has her way.

Browner wants to sever, or decouple, a utility’s profits from the amount of electricity it sells. More electricity means more coal and natural gas burning, which, according to green dogma, means more greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. So Browner believes that less electricity production is, at least, a partial answer to climate change. But less electricity would mean less profitability for electric utilities, a powerful Washington lobby that Browner can ill afford to antagonize.

To date, the electric utility industry has aided and abetted the climate alarmist cause, if not by actually lobbying for global warming regulation, then at least by its willingness to entertain such regulation as public policy worthy of serious consideration. But since endangering utility profits would likely galvanize the industry once and for all against emissions regulation, the green dilemma boils down to figuring out a way to reduce electricity sales while guaranteeing utility profits. Enter decoupling.

How would decoupling actually function in practice? There are several different schemes for decoupling, but their tedious complexity precludes elaboration here. But the schemes all essentially amount to the same thing — sticking it to ratepayers and taxpayers. This should come as no surprise, when you stop to think about it.

Decoupling involves government guaranteeing electric utilities steady or steadily increasing profits for selling less electricity. That means implementing one of three basic scenarios: (1) consumers paying more for less electricity; (2) electricity prices remaining steady and taxpayers being called upon to subsidize the difference between the profits from actual electricity sales and the profits guaranteed by government; or (3) some combination of the two. There are no other possibilities.

Decoupling advocates assert that the consumers can avoid higher electric bills through “voluntary conservation measures” — that is, you can lower your bill by using less power. It’s a specious assertion since consumers will still pay higher rates for the electricity they use. Moreover, “voluntary conservation” is not necessarily without cost. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs, insulation, weather stripping, solar panels and other electricity conservation efforts all can entail significant added costs that can take many years to pay for themselves.

Getting back to Browner, what could be more anti-capitalistic than to disassociate profits from sales? It’s often difficult enough to determine profits when they are tied to sales — ask any author or recording artist. Imagine the difficulty, arbitrariness and potential for gamesmanship, if not just plain fraud, involved with government-dictated profitability based on reducing productivity. In the case of electric utilities, already a most heavily regulated enterprise, even greater government regulation of the industry will be required, which, of course, is what a good socialist like Browner would want.

Perhaps what’s most troublesome about all this is the stealthiness. Less than a week after Browner was outed as a Socialist International muckety-muck, the group scrubbed its web site of her photo and evidence of her commission membership. And in the larger picture, it’s intellectually dishonest for advocates of socializing electric utilities to promote the euphemistic “decoupling” as if it were some novel solution rather than what it really is — a subversion of our capitalistic system.

You know, one might get the impression that there’s actually something wrong with, and embarrassing about, a key White House adviser advocating the undermining of a basic principle of our economic system.

I am glad to hear some speak up against this bullying but honestly would it matter as long as the U.S. keeps being Israel's *****?

Shocking language I know but....

Funny to hear talk of a settlement being considered by the Israelis...umm not...

This wasn't about the poor Israelis being subjected to incoming rockets..it was a well timed offensive at the end of the Bush administrations watch...it was a deliberate effort to kill and maim without consequence.

Why? Because assuredly Bush wouldn't do jack.

This action is obscene on so many levels.

Israel is not the friend of the United States. Why do we continue to support and defend a nation that engages in terrorism, spies on the United States and costs us huge amounts of money?