Voil, I was careful to not state that your opinion was this or that, just that it was my understanding. I got that from some opinions you had stated regarding Israel in the past. I might not have it quite right. What I was trying to do was address a concern I thought you most likely held about the Israeli position and to give my related opinion. So if you will, please, overlook that part and consider the rest of what I have tried to say.

I am giving a very moderate view here and I am getting the failing grade as if I were an extremist. It hardly seems reasonable.

Fanta, to say that with proper English you should say " I bet there HAVE been more people in my family..." not HAS.

I'm curious as to why you would be concerned with whether any family member has left me money. I don't concern myself much with it.

Voil, I was careful to not state that your opinion was this or that, just that it was my understanding. I got that from some opinions you had stated regarding Israel in the past. I might not have it quite right. What I was trying to do was address a concern I thought you most likely held about the Israeli position and to give my related opinion. So if you will, please, overlook that part and consider the rest of what I have tried to say.

I am giving a very moderate view here and I am getting the failing grade as if I were an extremist. It hardly seems reasonable.

Fanta, to say that with proper English you should say " I bet there HAVE been more people in my family..." not HAS.

I'm curious as to why you would be concerned with whether any family member has left me money. I don't concern myself much with it.

I don't think they kid needs 15 years in prison over this. 15 years is too long. Probably he has had enough jail time already, but I don't know his history, or the likelihood he will repeat. The justice system will not give him 15 years anyway.

The court did not say he was innocent, they said he could not be tried on the charge as an adult because he was 16 at the time of the beating. Now they have to choose to try him as a child or release him. Sounds like the justice department is working in his favor.

Here is the quote Bear:

JENA, La. — A judge on Friday denied a request to release a teenager whose arrest in the beating of a white classmate sparked this week's civil rights protest in Louisiana.

Just like I said.

If you get into the criminal system you have to go through the criminal system.

Just like I said.

Behave yourself and don't gang-beat someone, things will be better all around.

Just like I said.

Since I was right all the way through, clearly there was some part of it you didn't understand. So if you don't mind, what part of that didn't you understand? Maybe I can repeat it more slowly for you.

Fanta, I learned all that stuff when I was a teenager. You'll never catch up. Voil, I don't even go to fast food places to eat. I like the vegetables too much. Fanta, I am not a nuclear head. How many times do I have to tell you. I am not interested in nuclear bombing at all, by anyone. I'm much more euro-centric in my thinking than any of you imagine here. All I am trying to point out is that you have to keep your eyes open and be aware of your neighbors if they are making threatening motions towards you.

If you hate that your country is an oil consuming nation, go away and don't help consume any. Otherwise your comments are just hollow. How are you going to put all those amps and ohms to work without using some energy?

In my opinion 3,000 killed at the world trade center was significant. How can you say it is unimportant? What if it were your son or father killed there? Would you still be so forgiving?

Anoasis, one bomber group blew up the OKC courthouse, but in Iraq there are bombs every day. In Israel, the Palestinians have made a national sport of it. It does not have to be a stereotype for it to be considered a problem. There are more middle eastern bombers than locals.

I don't have a self-righteous attitude about any of this. I do not want the world to go down the path of anarchy. If terrorists and zealots control the huge stocks of weapons and educate their offspring to be hateful and to destroy civilization at any cost for the purposes of ushering in some 7th century idealism the world will head towards anarchy. That is what is being done by Iran and countries of their ilk.

I personally do not think nuking Iran to the stone age is the answer. Lots of people do, but I am not one of them. I simply want to see some more moderate people run the country and I want them to stop supporting terrorist groups in Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine and other places.

Voil I have the understanding that you consider Israel to be illegal and that they are usurpers of the Palestinian lands and people. There may be some truth in that and the Palestinians have some historical claim to the land. However you can't throw all the Jews out of Jerusalem any more than the US can throw all the Hispanics out of the United States. At some point we all have to learn to get along with our neighbors.

Now one thing we are doing different here is we are not educating our children to hate and bomb and destroy the Mexicans who come here trying to get a better life. Instead, for the most part we welcome them, give them jobs, sell them houses and cars and then we complain when some of them are criminals, rightfully so. Maybe the Palestinians could take a lesson from that. Maybe the Iranians could take a lesson from that.

Invisible, your country is not a goose.

Is there some place I can go to buy my own Ponzi? Because 40 million bucks sounds pretty good about now. Can we modify things a little so it is legal? I wouldn't want to break any laws.

Apparently the court did not agree that this was simply a racial bias matter because they declined to let the kid out.

When the courts start caving in to vigilante groups we have a bigger problem.

When someone goes to jail for assault, he has to go through the system, and then he gets out. The system says make bail or stay in jail till trial. Happens to everybody in that predicament.

Behave yourself and don't gang-beat someone, things will be better all around.

Wow you're really hyped up on this aren't you. I'm sure you never made a mistake with a nuclear weapon so I guess its fair for you to complain.

I still think it is fair for the US to have them even though Iran and Syria do not. For one thing there is the Russia and china factor. It might not be too good of an idea to let only Russia have them and not us, or only China and not us, but to carry that through to every country in the world is absurd. I know with your own brand of equanimity you can't stand that thought, but, oh well, tough luck, you don't get to make the rules.

As for the reports of the Syrian explosion, where chemical weapons accidentally exploded killing Iranians and Syrians while they were loading them into scud missles, oh well. Those things can be dangerous, and they are illegal anyway. Speculation is that those are some of the Iraqi WMD supplies that came across the border just before the Iraq war. Maybe somebody didn't lie after all moveon.

It is said that Syria has one of the most active chemical and biological weapons programs anywhere presently.

There was a report of an Israeli attack on a nuclear weapons site in Syria which was being put together somehow with the help of North Korea. So fortunate that the negotiations have put North Korea' nuclear programs to rest.

Syria, Iran and North Korea are such good neighbors, I can see why people would prefer to criticize the United States.

Fanta your title didn't have anything to do with your post.

Yeah bear you need to go on, because you're wrong in this case. This was a case of a gang of black guys beating a white guy. So its apparently not always white people going off on black people. Sometimes it is one way and sometimes it is the other.

The issue here is a bunch of kids ganged up on one kid and beat the hell out of him. One of the kids who beat him had assaulted others before and been arrested for it before, twice. That kid is in jail. So what. He probably needs to be in jail.

You want to let him out because he is black? You think it is reasonable to terrorize a town because a hoodlum is in jail for assault? You think that it was justified because someone else did something offensive? That sounds a lot like what you are saying here.

It sounds to me like you oppose justice for a kid who got beat up because the guys who assaulted him were black. If there is no justice then more violence results.

While claiming to want fairness for the kid in jail, the protesters are actually trying to obstruct justice for the other boy. They should all go home and behave themselves. Sharpton should be ashamed for provoking this hoopla.

If any kid at school is guilty of assault three times, and the last time it is a case of gang violence, he needs to be in jail. Excusing it for any reason, black or white is illogical and provocative in its own right.

I am completely against you on this one.

The kid in jail... The judge has refused to lower his $90,000 bail, citing Bell's record, which includes four juvenile offenses -- two simple battery charges among them.

So the kid has two prior arrests for battery.

As for the kid who was beat, he was not one of the ones responsible for the noose. I checked.

If you forgive the guys who beat him you might as well say they can beat your own kid, because they had nothing to do with the noose either.

Yeah well the noose was wrong too, but ask yourself this, did the guy who was beat ever say he hung the noose? I am thinking that he most likely did not.

So who hung the noose and who was beat might ne completely different.

So I think you are saying that if anyone wrongs a black then a gang of blacks can gang up on any white kid they want and beat the hell out of them. If that is your idea of fair I don't want you for a neighbor under any circumstances.

I think Sharpton should be ashamed for not looking at that aspect of the issue. Didn't they threaten to burn down the town if the guys weren't set free? Inexcusable.

Didn't MLK ask that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" When people quote MLK they conveniently leave out the "content of their character" part. I guess that makes it easier to ask for special treatment for the color of their skin. Unfortunately.

To the point of this protest, if they boys in question had a quality content of their character they would not have beat the hell out of that kid. Color has little to do with it, just character.

Always treat people with good character well.

Lizardking said "Who the hell cares about greenspan?!" ha ha ha

I disagree with this largely. Greenspan managed to make some cheap money available, certainly, but his did this with many years of careful management, bringing the rate lower and lower year by year. This was accomplished by tight control over growth and the economy rather than the reverse as implied by the topic.

If you look carefully at the statistics through the years you will see that he managed to step inflation and interest rates downwards year by year until they finally reached the low levels mentioned in the topic. The rates of both were lowered by about 1% per year. This is done essentially by keeping the economy tight enough to keep the unemployment 1% higher than would otherwise be normally expected. So this process of lowering the interest rates from Paul Volker's legacy rate or 18 percent or so was a 10 to 15 year excursion.

During that time the artificially tight controls over the fed for the purposes of lowering inflation and interest has had the result of keeping the value of the dollar high and increasing the competitiveness of foreign companies in the United States market. There are advantages and disadvantages in this.

Some of the advantages are cheaper imports and more foreign investment in the American economy and particularly the stocks and bonds markets. Some of the disadvantages are higher unemployment and the crushed manufacturing sector in the United States. It is a difficult choice which to prefer because both have serious ramifications. I'll leave it to you to form your own opinion.

Turning this into a Bush bash is a bit of a laugh.

If you want more information about the Keyensian model you might google it.

Insurance companies are in it for profit. This means that they will always look for reasons to raise your premium and to deny your charges. With a cadre of attorneys and with their signature required for you to get medical bills paid, they have the power. Each time they deny a payment unfairly, it amounts to theft from you, except that you do not have the power to put them in jail for the theft. What you can do is whine and complain, ultimately sue for payment or complain to the state insurance board. No available recourse is adequate in my opinion.

So finding something new and better seems a good idea. But if the government gets in the business of denying care or regulating behavior patterns as a prerequisite for health care, you will hear some unfortunate stories from mistreated patients. Besides that if you do not pay for health coverage, will the government then tax you for the amount or perhaps give you penalties or even jail time?

When you demand that every citizen have a service, provided by private enterprise, and that each citizen pay for that service, then it seems to me it should be the responsibility of the government to assure that every individual has the means to pay. How could this be accomplished? Without a credit directly to each person for the needed amount I can not see this occurring.

It is a complicated issue because everybody has different needs. A young healthy person may pay 150 for insurance per month, while an older unhealthy person may pay 800 or 1,000 per month.

An insurance company which gets a guarantee that everybody must subscribe to their plan has even more incentive to raise prices. If they can skew the actuarial tables and limit their payouts they scoop even more profits. I just think it is a dangerous path, however noble it is to want everyone covered.

It seems to me that there might be some health care alternatives that could be considered. Imagine for a moment if there were specialized centers for specific sorts of ailments where lots of people could go through treatment programs efficiently at a low cost. This would be against the insurance company's interests because reducing their costs would reduce the premiums they could charge.

If the insurance companies set their prices based on a projected earnings of a certain percentage, then the higher the charges are for treatment, the higher the prices for insurance will be and the higher the insurance company profits will be.

Hillary shows her new health care plan,

Under Hillary Clinton's plan, Americans must have health insurance like drivers must buy auto insurance.

Does anybody have any feelings about that particular law? I have always had the strong feeling that the car insurance lobby shoved this down our throats. If you don't have car insurance the consequences are quite dire. A ticket for no car insurance never goes away, stays on your record forever, different than other tickets in that way.

If you have a ticket for no car insurance you have to buy special insurance with much higher costs, another lobby perk for the insurance companies.

If your insurance lapses you can be charged a higher rate when you restart, another perk to the insurance companies from the lobby.

Anybody else have knowledge of specific insurance lobby perks enacted with that law?

Will the health insurance law give them power to somehow rip you financially if you don't pay up? Will the poor who can not afford to pay get special penalties and have to pay more as a result? Will there be fines or jail for the people who are too poor to pay?

With a name like Mohamed, ElBaradei can't be all bad. Right? So Mohamed ElBaradei says that only the UN can decide of there should be war? Self serving determination on his part isn't it? Why shouldn't he just parade around and beat his chest and say he is the king of everything.

The United States with UN approval and a coalition went into Iran in 1991. As a condition of cease fire Iraq agreed to certain terms. They had not met those terms. Without some finality the conditions would have continued without end. There was no proof of destruction of WMD by Iraq, nor was there proof that they remained.

So long as they did not meet the terms of the cease fire there was justification for further action.

There was proof that Hussein was flaunting his cease fire agreement in many ways.

It is unfortunate for Bush that the WMD were not found, but I expect some were slipped out of the country or buried where they would not be found. Its a pretty big country.

It is unfortunate that we have come to this point, that Iraq has no peace and people from all over the region insist that they have no peace, but that is where we are. Hopefully some resolution can be found.

It seems to me now that we have some responsibility to help clean things up, but also that Iraq should look into its own heart and find some compromise with their brothers of another sect.

Iran is a different kettle of fish and it smells a hell of a lot worse.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a televised interview Sunday that European nations should consider sanctions outside the U.N. framework if Iran continues to ignore a Security Council call to halt its production of enriched uranium -- and he added, "We must prepare ourselves for the worst."

In Iran, the response was-
Hosseini (Irans' foreign minister) also said that the use of "convulsive words" ran counter to "the historical, cultural and civilizational dignity and position of France,"

I think they maybe are having some culture shock related to Sarkozy's deference.

While France opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kouchner's remarks on Iran follow previous hard-line statements by France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In August, the conservative Sarkozy said a nuclear-armed Iran was "not acceptable."

"I think there is a new France since Sarkozy came to power," Dominique Moisi, an analyst at the French Institute on Foreign Relations, told CNN. "There is a new style of diplomatic content, and obviously there is a new relationship with the U.S. and Washington"

Oh well.

It was my understanding that all French companies have been asked not to enter into contracts with Iran, not just a few. Its ironic that Germany has just said it will not support any more sanctions against Iran because it would likely interfere with their business interests. Well that's one for two anyway. I am wondering if there are some specific contracts Germany has concerns about and if those might be settled outside of the Iran arena.