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Court Hears How Army Bulldozer Killed Peace Activist

By JONATHAN COOK

Seven years after Rachel Corrie, a US peace activist, was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza, her family was to put the Israeli government in the dock today.

A judge in the northern Israeli city of Haifa was due to be presented with evidence that 23-year-old Corrie was killed unlawfully as she stood in the path of the bulldozer, trying to prevent it from demolishing Palestinian homes in Rafah.

Corrie’s parents, Craig and Cindy, who arrived in Israel on Saturday, said they hoped their civil action would shed new light on their daughter’s killing and finally lead to Israel’s being held responsible for her death. They are also seeking damages that could amount to millions of dollars if the court finds in their favour.

An internal army investigation was closed shortly after Corrie’s death, exonerating both the bulldozer driver and the commanders who oversaw the operation.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook03112010.html

Journalists Will Have to Reinvent Their Future

By MARIE BÉNILDE

Paris.

Journalists are now in the same situation as steel workers in the1970s: they are destined to disappear, but they don’t know it. That was the assessment of a banker from BNP-Paribas at the French national press federation’s conference in Strasbourg in 2006. His words caused a sensation, but the statistics support him: having lost more than 2,300 jobs last year, the French press is going through a similar crisis to the United States, where more than 24,500 jobs were axed in 2009. Only 300,000 now work in newspapers in the US, compared to 415,000 a decade ago (according to Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted by Market Watch. The Washington Post has closed its regional bureaus, and the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune have filed for bankruptcy protection. Every national daily in France, apart from the sports daily, L’Equipe, has lost money.
http://www.counterpunch.org/benilde03102010.html

Former NHTSA Head Blasts Coziness Between Watchdog Agency and Auto Industry

Source: ABC

Regulators Went to Work for Toyota - and Ford, GM, Chrysler and Three Other Foreign Carmakers

By MARK SCHONE and JOSEPH RHEE

Calling NHTSA a "lapdog, not a watchdog," Joan Claybrook, former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said the agency must adopt "tougher standards" for safety officials who go to work for the auto industry. Claybrook is scheduled to testify today at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection examining NHTSA operations.

Claybrook, who served as NHTSA administrator during the Carter Administration, said she has found 40 cases of former NHTSA and Department of Transportation officials who went to work for the auto industry, including Sue Bailey, a former NHTSA administrator who went to work for Ford Motor Co., and Rodney Slater, a former Secretary of Transportation, who was recently asked by Toyota to head up a special quality advisory board. Claybrook will include information on the cases in her testimony today.

While ties between NHTSA and Toyota are currently under scrutiny because of alleged safety defects in Toyota vehicles, Claybrook's 40 cases also involved all three major U.S. manufacturers, BMW, Honda and Suzuki, as well as auto trade associations.

Under federal law, an employee in the executive branch is barred for two years after leaving government service from representing any matter under the employee's previous official responsibility. NHTSA should impose a longer "cooling off" period, said Claybrook, contending that the auto industry has become too cozy with the agency. more...

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/nhtsa-head-blasts-coziness-watchdog-agency...

toniD's Ya Think?

A slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery--at best--in 2010. The macro news, including data on consumer confidence, home sales, construction and employment, actually suggests a significant downside risk even to the anemic levels of growth...
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/10/united-states-recovery-recession-opinio...

Hall of Famer, ‘Little House’ star Merlin Olsen dies

Source: MSNBC

SALT LAKE CITY - Pro Football Hall of Famer and former television actor Merlin Olsen has died. He was 69.

Utah State University assistant athletic media relations director Zach Fisher says Olsen died Wednesday night.

Olsen was an All-American at Utah State and a first-round draft pick of the Los Angles Rams in 1962.

He was part of the Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome” defensive line, which set an NFL record for the fewest yards allowed during a 14-game season in 1968.

Olsen is still the Rams’ all-time leader in career tackles with 915.

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/35817296/ns/sports-nfl

I remember both of his careers.

toniD's Ya Think?

Health-care reform's 'back-door' tax

Source: Fortune

WASHINGTON (Fortune) -- The big talk on Capitol Hill may be about health-care reform, but as part of this massive undertaking, the Democrats are quietly reshaping the tax system too. Tucked inside President Obama's latest health-care proposal is a major change to the Medicare tax.

Since its conception, the Medicare tax has always been tied to payrolls. Every paycheck, employers and employees each chip in 1.45%, regardless of how much someone makes. Under Obama's proposal -- which should be very close to what Congress winds up enacting -- a Medicare tax would now be applied to investment income too: Individuals who earn more than $200,000 and couples over $250,000 would pay an additional 2.9% surtax on unearned income from interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents.

...

Two things happen here. The first one is that the Medicare tax would go from being a payroll tax (like Social Security) to an income tax.

...

But by giving the Medicare tax the qualities of an income tax, Democrats can raise taxes on high-earners without explicitly calling it an income tax hike. The proposal also targets this group by adding 0.9% to their payroll portion of the Medicare tax too. Adding a tax just for households making over $250,000 would make the tax progressive for the first time.

Read all about it here:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/10/news/economy/medicare_tax.fortune/index....

toniD's Ya Think?

if i hear one more liberal talking head tell me its time to take the deal i'm going to puke. i had to turn schultz off, he's over the top. throw in trashing kuccinich and its too much too bear.

America's Craziest Cities

Move over, Las Vegas. After two years of national doldrums, crazy is on the rise again. From shrinks to drinks, The Daily Beast tallies who’s handling their stress—and who’s losing it.

Keep Austin Weird—the famous slogan from Austin, Texas, was conceived as a marketing tool, but it’s grown for some into a mantra. And why not? It’s been a rough couple of years. Those that don’t embrace a bit of zaniness risk having it consume them.

For these crazy times, The Daily Beast decided to rank America’s craziest cities—more specifically, the 57 largest metropolitan areas—using four criteria:

• Psychiatrists per capita: How many shrinks there are to fill the therapy demand per person, with data from the Census and Citysearch.com. Read: The lower the score, the more psychiatrists per capita.

• Stress: Emotional and mental health, based on a 2008 national survey by Gallup-Healthways.

• Eccentricity: How crazy, wacky, and weird each city is, compiled with help from travel writer, and student of all things eccentric, Mike Barish.

• Drinking: Whether the metropolitan area’s residents are heavy drinking, defined as two drinks a day or more for men, and one drink a day or more for women. With data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2008.

So, which city falls the furthest south of normal? Here’s a hint: it’s a bit north (and east) of Austin.

#1, Cincinnati

Psychiatrists per capita: 31 out of 57
Stress: 5 out of 57
Eccentricity: 12 out of 57
Drinking: 17 (tie) out of 57

Colorful Character: Jim Bonaminio won a local contest by creating a suite that looked like a grubby port-a-potty on the outside, but really led to a 10-stall restroom replete with flowers, marble, soft tile and tropical pictures.

Check the others at the link

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-11/americas-25-cr...

Chicago is #26. Surprised! Thought it would be closer to the top!

toniD's Ya Think?

Walking Away

It is, of course, partriotic, moral, and much easier to do when it's a corporation doing it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100310-708840.html?mod=WSJ_World_M...

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Commercial real estate owners are walking away from properties that have become untenable as investments, just as homeowners have walked away from houses they can no longer afford to pay off or sell.

The latest commercial property owner to do this is Vornado Realty Trust (VNO), the $13 billion real estate investment trust, which warned last week that it would walk away from two loans totaling $235 million.

The trend is likely to escalate in coming months as more loans mature and refinancing remains difficult and costly. As with residential properties, there is less incentive for owners to hold on to properties when the buildings are worth less than what is owed on their mortgages.

-Atrios 11:33

toniD's Ya Think?

The number of U.S. workers filing new applications for unemployment benefits fell slightly less than expected last week, hinting at a slow labor market recovery.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 462,000 from 468,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was a touch less than market expectations for 460,000.

Separately, the Commerce Department said the nation's trade gap shrank 6.6 percent to $37.3 billion as oil imports fell to their lowest since February 1999. However, U.S. exports also declined. Analysts had expected the deficit to widen to $41.0 billion from $39.9 billion in December.

"It (claims) came in within expectations, but it's not consistent with anything that indicates the labor market has turned the corner," said David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates in Toronto.

The U.S. dollar fell against the euro on the better-than-expected trade data, while stock index futures and Treasury debt prices held losses.

A Labor Department official said there were no special factors affecting the jobless claims data. The four-week moving average of new claims, which irons out week-to-week volatility, rose 5,000 to 475,500, the highest since late November.

While both claims and the four-week average remain at uncomfortably high levels, the labor market is showing signs of stabilizing. Government data this week showed jobs opened up in January at the fastest pace in nearly a year and other employment indicators continue to point to an improving trend.

Restoring growth to the labor market, hard hit by the most painful economic downturn since the 1930s, is crucial to sustaining the economy's recovery when the boost from government stimulus and a turn in the inventory cycle wanes.

Analysts were concerned that the narrowing of the trade balance also reflected a drop in exports.

"It's not so great in that it shows weakness in imports and exports. It also could mean that the foreign growth is not providing quite as positive an impulse as we had thought previously," said Zach Pandl, U.S. economist at Nomura Securities in New York.

The economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the downturn in December 2007 and there is rising optimism that payroll jobs growth could start as early as March.
more...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/35813376

toniD's Ya Think?

sounds like a dubious honor at best. i would have picked the creation museum over jungle jims. bonaminio runs a grocery on the cincinnati-fairfield road that has one of everything. one whole part of the store is ethnic and he covers the world. we go there a couple of times a year. it really is a pretty wild place and its huge. if he doesn't carry it, you don't need it.

Dobson forced out of Focus on the Family
by John Aravosis (DC) on 3/11/2010 01:46:00 PM
I had heard a while back that Dobson appeared to be losing his empire, but this appears to be confirmation.

Dobson is - was - THE leader of the religious right. They didn't come any badder than him. I remember a Republican friend telling me, only a few years back, that the GOP tended to think of the religious right as nutballs, other than Dobson. Dobson they feared.

Not any more.

A prominent friend and supporter of James Dobson believes Dobson was pushed aside by the new leadership of Focus on the Family, who want the powerhouse evangelical ministry to project a softer image on issues ranging from abortion to gay marriage to relations with President Obama.

"[T]the board of directors voted privately on Wednesday -- before we got there -- to ask for my resignation, although their request was made with kindness and respect. We can only guess the reason for their decision because frankly I don't fully know," Dobson said. "But it apparently has to do with the desire for closure on my tenure and the beginning of another."

The article goes on to quote our good friend, arch-homophobe Pastor Ken Hutcherson. You might remember Hutcherson from a few years back when we were both sparring over Microsoft's support for gay rights (I won).

This article substantiates everything Joe and I have been writing for the past year. The LEAD religious right group forces out the LEAD religious leader because he's too harsh on abortion and gay rights.

So what are the two issues that Democrats still routinely cave on? Abortion and gay rights. Well, they cave on everything. But there's still a special place in the White House's and Congress' hearts for caving on choice and the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

So what does this tell us? That the White House and the Democrats in Congress are deeply out of touch with the American people. Think about it. Not only have Republicans pretty much refused to make gay rights an issue over the past year (with the sole exception of Kevin Jennings). But we now see the religious right pulling back on those issues. You'd think the Democrats would smell an opportunity, or at the very least would stop being afraid to stand up for those constituencies.

But they don't.

That's because there is something seriously wrong with the thinking in the White House and Congress. A kind of fear seems to paralyze both locales. I have no idea what we can do about it, though it seems pretty clear what they voters are thinking of doing about it. Voting the Democrats out in 2010, and quite possibly doing the same on a larger scale in 2012.

http://www.americablog.com/2010/03/dobson-forced-out-of-focus-on-family....

toniD's Ya Think?

Underexplored Elements of Ryan Budget Roadmap

160px-paulryan

There are actually a few more problems with the “budget roadmap” released by top House GOP budgeteer Paul Ryan that have become clear to me based on some conversations with economists. To recall, the basic problem with the Ryan Ripoff is that it doesn’t balance the budget but does raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans, while slashing critical social services.

That said, the plan would also likely destroy the private health insurance system in the United States by eliminating the tax preference for employer-provided health insurance plans. This tax preference is not very good public policy, but it’s a hidden government intervention that’s critical to making our “private” insurance system work, insofar as it works at all. Without it, absolutely everybody is going to wind up on a totally dysfunctional individual market. For rich people, who’ll be getting a giant tax cut, this is fine since just paying out of pocket will be a small price to pay for Ryan’s massive enrich-the-rich tax policy. For everyone else it’s a problem.

Meanwhile, by completely eliminating corporate income tax and taxation of dividends, he’s opening the door to massive tax evasion. Someone like, say, me could quit my job and then start a company YglesiasCorp. YglesiasCorp would employ me for a very low salary, and CAP would contract with YglesiasCorp for blogging services. YglesiasCorp’s income would be untaxed, and as the sole owner of YglesiasCorp, I would have the company pay me dividends, which would also be untaxed. Ta-da! The Tax Policy Center’s analysis of Ryan’s plan doesn’t attempt to capture how much of this would happen, and Ryan doesn’t seem to have any thoughts on what might prevent it. Realistically, his idea would probably need to be reformulated as an even-more-regressive program that relied exclusively on consumption taxes. And it would be doing this not to raise the necessary amount of revenue to keep delivering needed services, but in the context of massive cuts to important programs.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/underexplored-element...

toniD's Ya Think?

Krugman

Markets are getting slightly more bullish on Greek debt — and Peter Boone and Simon Johnson are crying bubble. I’m not so sure, but I think their argument highlights something else: the possibility of multiple equilibria in sovereign solvency.

What they argue, basically, is that with Greek debt likely to hit 150 percent of GDP, the burden of servicing that debt will be intolerable. They reach this conclusion by assuming that Greece will have to pay very high interest rates, say 10 percent, on its debt.

But in the past, some countries have managed levels of debt that high or higher, without default:

By the way, this wasn’t all about wars. In the 20th century, British debt passed 150 percent of GDP for the first time in 1921; it didn’t fall below 150 percent again until 1937.

So how is that possible? Suppose that Greece had as much credibility as Germany, and could borrow at a real interest rate of 2 percent. Then stabilizing the real value of its debt, even with a debt ratio of 150 percent, would require a primary surplus of only 3 percent of GDP. That’s certainly possible for some countries, although maybe not for Greece.

Boone and Johnson assume, however, that Greece would have to pay 10 percent nominal, say 8 percent real. Servicing that would require a primary surplus of 12 percent of GDP, probably impossible for almost anyone.

So this suggests that optimism or pessimism about future default can, to at least some degree, be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not a new insight, I know, but it looks increasingly important for thinking about where we are now.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/beware-of-greeks-getting-gif...

toniD's Ya Think?

Bernie Sanders: I’m Prepared To Introduce Public Option Amendment

The public option just might get its straight up-or-down vote after all.

Senator Bernie Sanders, in a brief interview in the Capitol just now, confirmed to me that he’s willing to commit to introducing an amendment that would add the public option to the Senate bill’s reconciliation fix.

This is important, because as far fetched as this seems, if this amendment is introduced, a vote on it would be very hard for the Senate Dem leadership to block. The only thing that could stop it from happening, according to Senate expert Robert Dove, is for the parliamentarian to rule that it’s not germane to the Senate bill somehow — something that seems unlikely.

“I think somebody should do that, and I’d certainly be prepared to do that,” Sanders told me when I asked him if he’d be willing to commit to introducing a public option amendment. This is, in effect, a commitment to introduce the amendment if no one else does.

The possiblity that a single Senator will introduce a public option amendment — which would get a straight majority vote — is actually worrying to Senate Dem leaders. Indeed, Dick Durbin, the number two Senate Dem, yesterday told reporters that this would create headaches and even conceded that the leadership might be forced to ask liberal Senators to vote against it to ensure smooth passage for the overall bill.

Now, however, Sanders is essentially committing to doing it if no one else does. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the public option will indeed get its day in the Senate — and that the Senate Dem caucus may be forced to stand up and be counted on it.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/health-care/bernie-sanders-im-prepared...

toniD's Ya Think?

I had to turn him off because he has Tom Tancredo on. I don't want to listen to him! So I am taking a break until he's gone!

toniD's Ya Think?

Submitted by toniD on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 2:42pm.
...Think about it...
---------
The expression pasted above, whether written or spoken, annoys me.

Thank you.

n.b.--John Aravosis wrote the words, not toniD, although toniD has written them on other occasions after which I bit my lip while I banged my head on the desk.

...and the alternative is what? By not thinking about it, you are actually thinking about it more. Maybe fuhgetabowdit would be better?

...and the alternative is what? By not thinking about it, you are actually thinking about it more. Maybe fuhgetabowdit would be better?

Submitted by maggiesboy on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 3:38pm.
---------
It is supposed to draw attention to a complex detail or a point being made. I guess? Otherwise, it is filler to pump the word count.

There are other and better ways to highlight. It insults me and annoys me to be instructed to think about it. My response is, "Go fuck yourself."

[I had found this about 1/2 hr ago but didn't expect it to be so current.]
[kind of reminds me of Zappa a little bit]

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

Submitted by maggiesboy on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 3:38pm.
...By not thinking about it, you are actually thinking about it more...
--------
Au contraire, stamp glue breath.

You are not not thinking about it when you are thinking about it more.

"Stamp glue breath" reminds me of an old joke.

An irate nerd asks maggiesboy, "What have you done for me philately?"

of what you are talking about. Don't have time to think about it right now. So I suggest to bite down on a pencil and put a pillow on your desk!

toniD's Ya Think?

Crank, I can't make heads or tails
Submitted by toniD on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 4:05pm.
of what you are talking about.
---------
Think about it.

(It pains me to write this even though it's only for a laugh.)

I've had this thought for awhile, and Thom Hartmann said it today on his program, are the republicans allowing Dems to change the filibuster rules so that they can blame the Dems next time they are in power and the Dems try to stop one of their bad bills?

toniD's Ya Think?

Obama's Nobel Money: President Chooses Charities To Receive Prize

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has announced which groups will get the $1.4 million he received for winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama said Thursday that $250,000 will go to Fisher House, a national nonprofit that houses families whose loved ones are receiving care at Veterans Administration medical centers. He will give another $200,000 to the Bush-Clinton Haiti Fund to help the country recover from the earthquake.

The balance will go to an array of other groups including education foundations, scholarship funds and regional development groups in Africa and Central Asia.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/obamas-nobel-money-presid_n_495...

toniD's Ya Think?

Don't have to think about that much, unfortunately.

Have a great evening.

Later

toniD's Ya Think?

Corey Haim and I

No, I never met him... at least to my knowledge.
When I first moved here I lived in a place called Oakwood Apartments for a year. I recently learned that he died in that apartment "community." Oakwood is basically a huge country club and a town unto itself.
They are reporting that his death was sad because he was reduced to living in "cheap, month-to-month housing." Well, their cheapest apartment (a studio unit) costs almost 2 K monthly. I guess that "cheap" is relative.

"You look so tired-unhappy
Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us"
-Radiohead.
www.sigzone.blogspot.com

Well, I’m going to offend many in Sederville. It won’t be the first time. After all, you can’t accuse the progressive movement of being monolithic. So with that in mind, I feel compelled to express how I feel.

I’m being inundated with emails from the Dennis Kucinich campaign. You probably are too. Indeed, Kucinich is a God among some Progressives. So I guess I’m about to desecrate holy ground, here. Though I admire his speaking truth to power, I think it’s merely theater.

When Dennis wants something (usually money) he introduces a bill. Of course he knows it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing. But it’s red meat for the Progressives. Its real purpose is to raise money. When he introduced articles of impeachment against Cheney in 2007, it was really about campaign funds for his own presidential bid. The same is true when he introduced articles of impeachment against the Bush Administration in 2008. This is what Dennis has done throughout his public life. He uses these controversies and capitalizes off of them. So it really isn’t about you, it’s about him.

His district has been neglected. The constituents get nothing. Cleveland is a phuccing mess. When the horrors of the 2000 & 2004 presidential elections occurred in Ohio, Dennis was missing in action. He has remained pretty quiet about Ohio’s criminal elections. That’s appalling to me. And it appears- he will continue to keep his trap shut. That is, as long as his seat is safe. Furthermore, it was John Edwards who came to Ohio and finally won an increase in the minimum wage. Kucinich was not in attendance.

What he likes- is being a star. He went from being a pro-life regressive to the darling of the Progressives. He likes sashaying with celebrities. He’s the lone wolf for the little guy. He’s a big man now.

Leaders that are willing to give it all for nothing in return, no longer exist. Believe me Dennis is not one of them. King died a pauper. All of his money went to the movement. Things will change when we decide to risk everything for our cause. I hope it won’t be too late.

Now that I've cleared that up....

We woke up to a beautiful day here in Dallas. Yesterday was rainy and gray but today was clear and sunny in the morning.

Outside of the picture window upstairs in the room where I work out is a view of my neighbors yard across the alley. There is a huge pear tree in his back yard and it's really amazing this time of year. Today, it bloomed in a gorgeous display of white floweres. As I drove to work I saw that all of the pears in the hood had bloomed. The mallus or cherries, dog woods and red buds will follow within the week. This is a fantastic time of the year here and I'm planning on spending Saturday trimming all of the bushes.

I hope all of you are also loving it. Regards to A/O who's days are shrinking and getting cooler and darker.

Submitted by Fernando on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 6:16pm.
...I'm planning on spending Saturday trimming all of the bushes.
-----------
http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/megan-mariah-barnes-crashes-ca...

Police: Woman Crashes Car While Shaving Bikini Area

know one mentioned that there was a
"NEW THREAD"

Don't think about how much you hate being told not to think about it.

...and don't think about elephants either.

please get your email.

I know this is the wrong place to post this but I just have to say.... People who criticize Brad Keselowski need to grow the F up. It's called racing, not holding the door competitions. Brad Keselowski is paid not to give an inch to another competitor. I like Edwards but that was either really well executed show for the crowd or extremely bad judgment.

Thanks for reminding me Fernando. Sandy all your mail is bouncing. Do what Fernando says.

Citizens United Disaster Spreads, Resistance Builds
Submitted by toniD on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 9:09am.
By David Swanson, FreeSpeechForPeople

The damage from the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United v. FEC" continues to spread as feared. Newly emboldened corporations are suing to overturn state laws that restrict corporate spending on politics:

"A pro-natural resource development group [how's that for spin?] and a Bozeman painting company asked a Helena District Court on Monday to strike down Montana’s 1912 ban on corporate donations and expenditures to political campaigns to comply with a January U.S. Supreme Court ruling."

Meanwhile, the new third branch of government (the other two being the Democratic and Republican parties), the institution that had predicted in an amicus brief that it would be the largest beneficiary of "Citizens United," is now becoming just that. Here's an LA Times headline:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce grows into a political force: A swelling tide of money could put the business group in a better position to sway elections.

It's worth reading a bit of this:

"The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is building a large-scale grass-roots political operation that has begun to rival those of the major political parties, funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals. The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns.

"The chamber's expansion into grass-roots organizing -- coupled with a large and growing fundraising apparatus that got a lift from Supreme Court rulings -- is part of a trend in which the traditional parties are losing ground to well-financed and increasingly assertive outside groups. The chamber is certainly better positioned than ever to be a major force on the issues and elections it focuses on each year, analysts think."

But this is not just about registering people to vote. It's also about misinforming them so that they vote against their interests:

"[T]he recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to spend money to help elect or defeat candidates not only struck down a century of laws limiting such spending, but it also made many business executives feel more comfortable about using corporate money for political purposes. Industries that are the most directly affected by Washington policies and regulations -- pharmaceuticals, for example -- have always spent lavishly on lobbying and politics. But many others have held back, deterred by concern over violating the complex laws on campaign spending and by a general sense that putting money into politics might open companies to criticism. The Supreme Court decision appears to have allayed those concerns, according to corporate lawyers and others involved in the process."

I think that's a fair depiction, if you substitute the word "prosecution" for "criticism". This issue has also been examined by the Huffington Post, which found that companies are now a lot less concerned about "criticism" when they pressure their employees to vote and canvas for political candidates. Want to keep that job? Get out and raise money for the people who will take it away from you! Want a promotion? Turn out the voters for Wall Street and wars, and maybe your kids will still get an education somehow.

Grassroots pushback is coming from many angles. At http://stopthechamber.com a campaign has been launched to dissuade any candidates from accepting money from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile state and federal legislation is moving forward to partially undo the damage. And Constitutional Amendments to fix the problem in a major way are being introduced in Congress at a surprising pace. All of this activity is chronicled at http://freespeechforpeople.org on these pages:
at link

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/50657

===========================================

This is their push to go after local communities and privatize, privatize, privatize all our wealth centers (not this phony on-paper-only fake wealth, but real wealth -- property, resources, long-term profit centers like utilities).

What does that take? It takes shutting up dissent from grassroot groups. This includes tying up grassroots activists in meaningless litigation called 'slap suits'. They already apply this disgusting predatory and dishonest tactic, but I believe this 'money is freedom-of-speech, and coporations have more money and therefore MORE freedom-of-speech' stuff will put this on steroids combined with huge local P.R. programs to demean local issue grassroots movements.

Look out.

http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=...

Everybody knew you had a great left...

but...who knew you could float like a bumblebee?

Please return my wring.

Thank you.

ted by maggiesboy on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 6:43pm.
Don't think about how much you hate being told not to think about it.
-----------
maggiesboy,

It's like this. An atoll is a reef remnant of a degraded volcanic sea mount while at all means not in the least.

They sound alike. Therein lies the first half of the joke.

Bikini is the second half of the joke. It is a steamy tropical region of tangled growth in one sense, and an atoll in the Marshall Islands in the other.

I hope this clears up your confusion.

[Note to toniD: Neither maggiesboy's comment nor my response has any relationship with anything whatsoever except pointless noogies delivered via text, so don't waste your time trying to figure out what the hell we're talking about.]

Doing this on impulse as I'm on the way out the door on an errand, so please forgive....

RE Cleveland being in the doldrums -- aren't most urban centers troubled?

And Kucinich and Cleveland go way back; he was the mayor and hung tough against privatizing utilities in Cleveland, which proved The Right Thing To DO in the long run, despite the ups and down of the whole situation (if I am remembering correctly).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich#Post-mayoralty

Clearly the DLC-Dem Machine dislikes him and try to undercut him because he does not sing their tune.

As for fund-raising--it is annoying and I want all campaigns and elections to be un-privatized and made PUBLIC.
I particularly dislike Obama's 'send me money' emails that seem to come in after he is in some flashy news thang. But Obama (who is a corporatist on the dole) and his emails sicken me way more than Kucinich's emails. Why does Obama want MY money when he can get some more from his pals on Wall Street and Monsanto et al? Kucinich is at least taking ethical stands on both the issues and the source of his funds, isn't he.

http://samsedershow.com/node/5708#comment-399872

More on Thom's perspective on "keeping" the filibuster here:
http://rt.com/About_Us/Programmes/The_Alyona_Show/2010-03-10/552670.html

at 48:46

Scott Brown had sexual harassment complaint
Did you know that Scott Brown -- the new star Republican Senator -- was accused of harassing a female campaign worker? Did the Democrats blow an opportunity to keep their 60th Senate seat?

http://gawker.com/5489364/the-scandalous-scott-brown-lawsuit-that-no-one...

toniD's Ya Think?

By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer Laurie Kellman, Associated Press Writer – 26 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's wife and daughter were hospitalized Thursday — the wife with a broken back and neck — after their minivan was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer truck on an interstate highway in suburban Virginia, authorities said.

Reid's wife, Landra, 69, and the couple's daughter, Lana Barringer, 49, were taken by ambulance to Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. Neither woman's injuries appeared to be life-threatening, and the daughter was expected to be released from the hospital Thursday night, Reid aides said. Mrs. Reid was listed in serious condition, an aide said, but she was not expected to require surgery.

"Mrs. Reid has a broken nose, broken back and broken neck," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said in a statement. "Lana has a neck injury and facial lacerations. Both Mrs. Reid and Lana are conscious, can feel their extremities, and according to doctors their injuries are non-life threatening."

Virginia State Police said Mrs. Reid and her daughter were traveling northbound on I-95 in stop-and-go traffic when their Honda Odyssey was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer loaded with rolls of plastic. The impact forced the Reid family's minivan to rear-end a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which in turn struck a Chevrolet Cobalt.

The driver of the tractor-trailer, Alan W. Snader, 59, of Ohio, was charged with reckless driving, police said. He was not injured. All involved were wearing seat belts, police said.

Reid, D-Nev., went to the hospital after being notified of the accident and returned to Capitol Hill for a meeting with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on efforts to pass health care legislation. He went back to the hospital Thursday evening.

Reid, 70, met Landra while they were attending Basic High School in Henderson, Nev. They were married in 1959. Lana was born two years later. The couple also have four sons: Rory, Leif, Josh and Key. Lana Barringer has three children.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100312/ap_on_go_co/us_reid_family_accident

toniD's Ya Think?

..but nothing like your gut buster above.

Well played sir, well played.

You'd think with associative words like coral, reef and lagoon I could at least muster a groaner, but I came up dry.

In one day, Grayson piles up another 40 co-sponsors for Medicare buy-in bill
by: Chris Bowers
Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 15:47

In just two days, Alan Grayson has piled up 50 co-sponsors to his Medicare buy-in bill, which is designed as a stand-alone bill rather than as an amendment to the health reform bill. Here is the complete list of 50 co-sponsors:

50 CURRENT COSPONSORS : Bob Filner, Jan Schakowsky, Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, Donna Edwards, Jared Polis, Chellie Pingree, Sheila Jackson Lee, Carol Shea-Porter, Diane Watson, John Lewis, Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Nydia Velazquez, Keith Ellison, Loretta Sanchez, Hank Johnson, Maxine Waters, Luis Gutierrez, Lynn Woolsey, Marcy Kaptur, Charles Rangel, Patrick Kennedy, Raul Grijalva, Donna Christian-Christensen, John Olver, Corrine Brown, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Marcia L. Fudge, Danny K. Davis, Pedro Pierluisi, Grace Napolitano, Alcee Hastings, John Hall, Shelley Berkley, John Conyers, Jim McGovern, Phil Hare, Betty Sutton, Jim McDermott, Gregorio Sablan, Maurice Hinchey, Carolyn Maloney, Barbara Lee, Elijah Cummings, Gregory Meeks, Edolphus Towns, Al Green, David Wu, and Rush Holt.

Every indication has always been that there is overwhelming support for a Medicare buy-in among Congressional Democrats. This could very well pass as a stand alone bill, especially in 2011 once filibuster reform has taken place. This is definitely one of the ways that progressives can viably continue the fight for real health reform no matter what happens to the current bill.

http://www.openleft.com/diary/17786/in-one-day-grayson-piles-up-another-...

toniD's Ya Think?

Submitted by maggiesboy on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 10:02pm.
--------
Lagoon is French for "the goon."

Hydro-Québec signs $1.5B power deal with Vermont utilities

Source: Montreal Gazette

Hydro-Québec signed a $1.5-billion memorandum of understanding Thursday to supply electricity to two Vermont utilities for 26 years, starting in 2012.

And the Quebec utility could cash in on another power deal with Vermont in the event Vermont Yankee, the state's only nuclear reactor, shuts down.

Premier Jean Charest called the agreement, which should be finalized by June, "win-win" and said in addition the Vermont legislature is considering a bill to recognize large hydro projects as green energy.

At present, electricity produced by large dams is considered not renewable energy by several U.S. states.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Hydro+Qu%C3%A9bec+signs+power+...

toniD's Ya Think?

Dems look to health vote without abortion foes
AP

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer Charles Babington, Associated Press Writer – 9 mins ago

WASHINGTON – House Democratic leaders Thursday abandoned a long struggle to strike a compromise on abortion in their ranks, gambling that they can secure the support for President Barack Obama's sweeping health care legislation with showdown votes looming as early as next week.

In doing so, they are all but counting out a small but potentially decisive group whose views on abortion coverage have become the principal hang-up for Democrats fighting to achieve the biggest change in American health care in generations. Congressional leaders are hoping they can find enough support from other wavering Democrats to pass legislation that only cleared the House by five votes in an earlier incarnation.

The concession came as House Democrats attended a lengthy meeting with White House health adviser Nancy Ann DeParle, who tried to answer questions, resolve differences and calm nerves, especially for lawmakers expecting tough challenges in November. Participants said they generally embraced White House-brokered compromises on prescription drug benefits for the elderly and new taxes on generous insurance plans.

At stake is the president's call to expand health care to some 30 million people who lack insurance and to prohibit insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people who have been sick. Almost every American would be affected by the legislation, which would change the ways many people receive and pay for health care, from the most routine checkup to the most expensive, lifesaving treatment. And most Americans would be required by law to get health insurance.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100311/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul

More Info From Daily Kos:

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the leadership will press ahead without reworking the abortion provision adopted by the Senate. Abortion opponents say the provision falls short in restricting taxpayer dollars for abortion coverage.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., has been pushing for stricter provisions and says he and a dozen or so abortion opponents would vote against the health care bill if the Senate's version is retained. Leaders will try to peel off some of those lawmakers and make up for any remaining deficit with Democrats who opposed the health care legislation on the first round, when it passed 220-215.

"Many of the pro-life members are going to support passage of the health care bill," Waxman predicted. "They're either satisfied enough with the Senate provision, or they decide that that's as much as they're going to get and they don't want to defeat health care."

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/3/11/845299/-Dems-will-Move-Ahead...

toniD's Ya Think?

Nevada lands first Chinese wind turbine factory in US

Source: Green Technology Daily

China’s A-Power Energy Generation Systems, in cooperation with US partners, says it will build a major wind turbine production and assembly plant in Nevada to serve the North and South American markets.

The factory, to be developed in conjunction with US Renewable Energy Group and American Nevada Group, will employ about 1,000 Nevada workers in “high paying, long-term jobs”.

According to A-Power's CEO, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was instrumental in convincing the China-based wind turbine producer to put a plant in his home state.

http://www.greentechnologydaily.com/solar-wind/661-nevada-lands-first-ch...

toniD's Ya Think?

Lehman Bankruptcy Report: Top Officials Manipulated Balance Sheets, JPMorgan And Citi Contributed To Collapse

The examiner in charge of investigating the bankruptcy of venerable Wall Street investment house Lehman Brothers, the most expensive bankruptcy in U.S. history, said in a report publicly released Thursday that senior officials failed to disclose key practices, opening them up to legal claims, and that JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup contributed to the firm's collapse. In addition, the report concludes that the firm's auditor, Ernst & Young, failed to meet "professional standards."

The exhaustive report was unsealed today by Judge James M. Peck, who said the report reads "like a best-seller."

The examiner, Anton Valukas, also found that parties have claims to pursue against JPMorgan Chase and Citibank in connection with their behavior regarding the modification of agreements with Lehman and their increasing collateral demands in Lehman's final days. These demands had a "direct impact" on Lehman's diminishing liquidity -- its cash on hand -- which was a prime reason behind the firm's demise.

"Citi is reviewing the report, which is over 2,000 pages long, but notes that, based on its preliminary review, the examiner has not identified any wrongdoing on Citi's part -- or anything that would suggest that Citigroup helped cause Lehman's collapse," said Danielle Romero-Apsilos, director of corporate affairs for Citi Institutional Clients Group.

The examiner's report notes:

The business decisions that brought Lehman to its crisis of confidence may have been in error but were largely within the business judgment rule.The business decisions that brought Lehman to its crisis of confidence may have been in error but were largely within the business judgment rule.

But the decision not to disclose the effects of those judgments does give rise to colorable claims against the senior officers who oversaw and certified misleading financial statements -- Lehman's CEO Richard S. Fuld, Jr., and its CFOs Christopher O'Meara, Erin M. Callan and Ian T. Lowitt.
Story continues below

There are colorable claims against Lehman's external auditor Ernst & Young for, among other things, its failure to question and challenge improper or inadequate disclosures in those financial statements.

The examiner defines a "colorable claim" as those for which the examiner "found that there is sufficient credible evidence to support a finding by a trier of fact." In other words, plaintiffs can start lining up.

The examiner notes that the issue giving rise to these potential claims was Lehman's creative use of repurchase agreements, otherwise known as repo. These are agreements between financial firms that essentially act as loans for cash -- one firm pledges collateral to another in exchange for cash with a promise that they'll buy back that collateral.

The examiner said the sole function of Lehman's use of repo was "balance sheet manipulation," according to the report:

Although Repo 105 transactions may not have been inherently improper, there is a colorable claim that their sole function as employed by Lehman was balance sheet manipulation. Lehman's own accounting personnel described Repo 105 transactions as an "accounting gimmick" and a "lazy way of managing the balance sheet as opposed to legitimately meeting balance sheet targets at quarter end." Lehman used Repo 105 "to reduce balance sheet at the quarter‐end."

The reason for that, the report notes, was to lower Lehman's leverage -- a critical component of the firm's credit rating.

In 2007‐08, Lehman knew that net leverage numbers were critical to the rating agencies and to counterparty confidence. Its ability to deleverage by selling assets was severely limited by the illiquidity and depressed prices of the assets it had accumulated.

Against this backdrop, Lehman turned to Repo 105 transactions to temporarily remove $50 billion of assets from its balance sheet at first and second quarter ends in 2008 so that it could report significantly lower net leverage numbers than reality.

Lehman did so despite its understanding that none of its peers used similar accounting at that time to arrive at their leverage numbers, to which Lehman would be compared...

Lehman's failure to disclose the use of an accounting device to significantly and temporarily lower leverage, at the same time that it affirmatively represented those "low" leverage numbers to investors as positive news, created a misleading portrayal of Lehman's true financial health.

Colorable claims exist against the senior officers who were responsible for balance sheet management and financial disclosure, who signed and certified Lehman's financial statements and who failed to disclose Lehman's use and extent of Repo 105 transactions to manage its balance sheet.

But Lehman wasn't alone in its gimmickry. The firm's auditor, Ernst & Young, one of the four biggest auditing firms in the world, failed in its oversight role:

In May 2008, a Lehman Senior Vice President, Matthew Lee, wrote a letter to management alleging accounting improprieties; in the course of investigating the allegations, Ernst & Young was advised by Lee on June 12, 2008 that Lehman used $50 billion of Repo 105 transactions to temporarily move assets off balance sheet and quarter end.

The next day ‐- on June 13, 2008 ‐- Ernst & Young met with the Lehman Board Audit Committee but did not advise it about Lee's assertions, despite an express direction from the Committee to advise on all allegations raised by Lee.

Ernst & Young took virtually no action to investigate the Repo 105 allegations. Ernst & Young
took no steps to question or challenge the non‐disclosure by Lehman of its use of $50 billion of temporary, off‐balance sheet transactions.

Colorable claims exist that Ernst & Young did not meet professional standards, both in investigating Lee's allegations and in connection with its audit and review of Lehman's financial statements.

In total, the examiner collected in excess of five million documents, estimated to
comprise more than 40,000,000 pages

Although a handful of subpoenas were threatened and in a few cases served, ultimately Valukas received nearly all requested documents voluntarily.

In all, more than 250 individuals were interviewed:

There was only one individual the Examiner sought to interview but could not. The Examiner requested an interview with Hector Sants, chief executive of the UK's Financial Services Authority ("FSA"), to discuss the FSA's involvement in the events of Lehman Weekend and the Barclays transaction. The FSA considered the request, but did not make Mr. Sants available for an interview. However, the FSA did provide detailed, written answers to specific questions that would have been posed to Mr. Sants.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/lehman-bankruptcy-report_n_4956...

READ the first part of the 2,200-page report (the full report is here):

http://lehmanreport.jenner.com/

toniD's Ya Think?

because they kill. I guess I do all of a sudden have issues with guns.

and that is why the Bible is holding us back as a species.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann Team Up For Fundraiser

Sarah Palin will appear at a fundraiser for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in April, Bachmann's re-election campaign announced on Thursday.

The event, to be held at the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel, will feature a dinner, reception and "photo opportunity," according to a statement from the campaign. The price of a ticket to the fundraiser has not been released.

Bachmann's campaign said that "plans are in the works for a rally" with Palin, but nothing firm has yet to be posted.

According to the Bachmann campaign, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and several members of Congress are part of the host committee for the fundraiser.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/sarah-palin-michele-bach_n_4953...

toniD's Ya Think?

Senate Parliamentarian: House Must Move First

The House must pass the Senate health care bill into law before fixes can be made to it through reconciliation, the Senate Parliamentarian told Republican leaders.

"The Senate Parliamentarian's office has informed Senate Republicans that reconciliation instructions require the measure to make changes in law," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Minority Leader Mitch McConell (R-Ky.), confirming a report in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.

Congress could then amend the law using the majority-vote reconciliation procedure. But at that point, a version of health care reform would be signed into law, lessening the pressure to move the package of fixes through.

The Senate, however, must convince the House that if it passes the Senate version, there will be at least 50 senators willing to support the reconciliation fix. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Rules Committee, quipped last week that the House would require a "blood oath" from the upper chamber.

Suspicion of the Senate and White House is high in the House because it has long been known that the president prefers the Senate health care bill and has been urging the House to simply pass it without fixes. The White House spent little time negotiating with the House over its bill, whereas the administration was intimately involved in the crafting of the Senate bill.

Regardless of what the parliamentarian rules, Vice President Joe Biden could overrule him.

A decision on the way forward is expected in the next few days.
Story continues below

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) said earlier he thought that reconciliation could not be used to amend a bill that has yet to become law.

You can't reconcile a bill that has not passed. That's not a law. We all in fourth grade saw the [short film], how a bill is made. Well the bill isn't made until the president signs the bill right. That is what you reconcile, something the president has signed and turned into a law. This concept that they are going to hold the big bill, the colossal bill, the asteroid heading towards earth bill, at the desk while they wait for the senate to finish the buy-in bill by passing the reconciliation bill doesn't work.

So any House member who is going to vote for the big bill on the belief that this trailer bill, the reconciliation bill will be passed by the Senate before the big bill gets signed by the president is being fed a lie because that's not the way it is going to work. We have talked this over with the parliamentarian, the language is unequivocally clear, it says reconciliation must change a law. And I'm pretty confident that that will be the view on the Senate floor.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/senate-parliamentarian-ho_n_495...

toniD's Ya Think?

Joseph Stiglitz Calls State Budget Cuts 'Very Foolish' And A 'Negative Stimulus For The Economy'

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, warned a New York City crowd last night that the rash of state budget cuts could have dire consequences for the economy.

Appearing at an event hosted by Manhattan's Jewish Community Center, Stiglitz said that state cutbacks would amount to "a negative stimulus of half the magnitude of the positive stimulus that is coming out of Washington."

The Columbia University professor and former World Bank economist spoke at "Rescuing The Economy: Two Expert Views", along with Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes , and Myron Kandel, the founding financial editor of CNN.

Stiglitz criticized the handling of the crisis by states such as New York, Illinois and California, where Governor Schwarzenegger is aiming to ease a $20 billion shortfall with cuts to public schools, higher education, and social services. According to a recent report, as many as 45 states have announced budget cuts that will hit vulnerable citizens, 29 of which impact K-12 education and 39 hitting higher education.

A vocal supporter of Keynesian economics Stiglitz argued that the Obama administration's stimulus package focused too much on supposedly "shovel-ready projects", and should have given money directly to states.

Forbes, a two-time candidate for the Republican nomination for president and an advocate for a flat tax, made for an unusual ally of Stiglitz on the topic of state budgets. Forbes agreed that California shouldn't have been cutting education budgets, but then argued California had been guilty of "binge spending."

Blasting California's pension management, Forbes said the state's fund managers "assumed that by 2009 the Dow Jones would be at 25,000. It's around 10,000 - a little miscalculation."
Story continues below

Despite their different opinions on the role of government in monetary policy, both Forbes and Stiglitz found some common enemies, including the IMF and, notably, the Federal Reserve.

An audience member asked the pair if the Federal Reserve was private, and, following an uncomfortable murmur in the crowd, Stiglitz replied, "That's a good question", calling the nature of the Fed "a little bit ambiguous" and stating that the functioning of the regional Feds made them somewhat like a "federally chartered club."

"The Fed's a creature of Congress," added Forbes. "The amazing thing is, when you say monetary policy people's eyes glaze over, especially in Congress. As a result, this powerful institution has less oversight in Congress then the CIA."

"I don't want Congress running the Federal Reserve, but that's quite different from accountability," Forbes added.

Stiglitz also had some more harsh words for the Fed: "If we looked at a banana republic with a structure like that, we would say you've got to change or we won't give you any money."

"It's just not consistent with a democratic government," he said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/joseph-stiglitz-calls-sta_n_494...

toniD's Ya Think?

Beware Of A Double-Dip Recession
Nouriel Roubini, 03.11.10, 12:01 AM EST
The shape of the U.S. recovery isn't a sure thing yet.

A slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery--at best--in 2010. The macro news, including data on consumer confidence, home sales, construction and employment, actually suggests a significant downside risk even to the anemic levels of growth which I forecast for H1 (the first half of the year). The U.S. faces continued challenges in H2--particularly as historic levels of fiscal stimulus fade--and appears far too close to the tipping point of a double-dip recession.

This is not the conventional wisdom. Heated debate continues to rage in the U.S. on whether the economic recovery will be V-shaped (with a rapid return to robust growth above potential), U-shaped (slow anemic, subpar, below trend growth for at least the next two years) or W-shaped (a double-dip recession). The V camp includes distinguished research groups and individuals such as Ed Hyman’s ISI, Larry Meyer’s Macroeconomic Advisors, the research group of JP Morgan, Michael Mussa and others.

The U camp includes--among others--Roubini Global Economics, Goldman Sachs' U.S. economic research group, PIMCO and Ken Rogoff. As early as August 2009 I expressed concern in a Financial Times op-ed about the risk of a double-dip recession, even if my benchmark scenario characterizes the risk of a W as still a low probability event (20% probability) as opposed to a 60% probability for a U-shaped recovery. Others worried about the double-dip risk also include David Rosenberg, Gary Shilling and John Makin.

Ed Hyman and I debated whether the recovery would be U- or V-shaped on a Feb. 22 conference call attended by over 2,200 listeners. Since that call, a slew of new U.S. macro data have come out. They have been almost uniformly poor, if not outright awful. Consumer confidence, based on the Michigan survey, has tanked. On the real estate front, new home sales are collapsing again, existing home sales are also falling sharply and construction activity (both residential and commercial) is sharply down. Durable goods orders are down, and initial claims for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly high (way above the 400,000 mark). Real disposable income for Q4 has been revised downward while real disposable income (before transfers) for January was negative again. more...

http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/10/united-states-recovery-recession-opinio...

toniD's Ya Think?

We are watching a subculture/CriminalClass (from the pool of about five percent of the population that is sociopathic and psychopathic) proceed to pursue a mini-imperialism WITHIN THE USA using Corporatist Profiteering, Corporatist Consolidation and Corporatist Privatization.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/cocaine-users-making-glob_n_491...

[excerpt]

Cocaine users were last night accused of helping to make global warming worse.

MPs on the home affairs select committee said the drug was devastating Colombian rainforests because trees are knocked down to grow coca plants.

[end excerpt]

---

Full story--

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/03/03/cocaine-users-making...

Submitted by toniD on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 10:12pm.
Dems look to health vote without abortion foes
AP

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer Charles Babington, Associated Press Writer – 9 mins ago

WASHINGTON – House Democratic leaders Thursday abandoned a long struggle to strike a compromise on abortion in their ranks, gambling that they can secure the support for President Barack Obama's sweeping health care legislation with showdown votes looming as early as next week.
...

==============================

"Compromise on abortion"? When are we gonna call it what it is? Then we could NEVER 'compromise' about it. 'Compromise on COMPULSORY PREGNANCY' just would NEVER hack it. But I get the feeling that most Dems don't want to call it what it is; then they couldn't 'compromise', I guess.

Thanks, Sam. That was loony. [Brushes away tears.]

The stinkin' scam "reads like a novel".

The FULL bankruptcy report document is at the bottom of this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/lehman-bankruptcy-report_n_4956...

[excerpt]

Lehman Bankruptcy Report: Top Officials Manipulated Balance Sheets, JPMorgan And Citi Contributed To Collapse
First Posted: 03-11-10 04:47 PM

...

The examiner said the sole function of Lehman's use of repo was "balance sheet manipulation," according to the report:

Although Repo 105 transactions may not have been inherently improper, there is a colorable claim that their sole function as employed by Lehman was balance sheet manipulation. Lehman's own accounting personnel described Repo 105 transactions as an "accounting gimmick" and a "lazy way of managing the balance sheet as opposed to legitimately meeting balance sheet targets at quarter end." Lehman used Repo 105 "to reduce balance sheet at the quarter‐end."
The reason for that, the report notes, was to lower Lehman's leverage -- a critical component of the firm's credit rating.

In 2007‐08, Lehman knew that net leverage numbers were critical to the rating agencies and to counterparty confidence. Its ability to deleverage by selling assets was severely limited by the illiquidity and depressed prices of the assets it had accumulated.

Against this backdrop, Lehman turned to Repo 105 transactions to temporarily remove $50 billion of assets from its balance sheet at first and second quarter ends in 2008 so that it could report significantly lower net leverage numbers than reality.

Lehman did so despite its understanding that none of its peers used similar accounting at that time to arrive at their leverage numbers, to which Lehman would be compared...

Lehman's failure to disclose the use of an accounting device to significantly and temporarily lower leverage, at the same time that it affirmatively represented those "low" leverage numbers to investors as positive news, created a misleading portrayal of Lehman's true financial health.

Colorable claims exist against the senior officers who were responsible for balance sheet management and financial disclosure, who signed and certified Lehman's financial statements and who failed to disclose Lehman's use and extent of Repo 105 transactions to manage its balance sheet.

But Lehman wasn't alone in its gimmickry. The firm's auditor, Ernst & Young, one of the four biggest auditing firms in the world, failed in its oversight role:

In May 2008, a Lehman Senior Vice President, Matthew Lee, wrote a letter to management alleging accounting improprieties; in the course of investigating the allegations, Ernst & Young was advised by Lee on June 12, 2008 that Lehman used $50 billion of Repo 105 transactions to temporarily move assets off balance sheet and quarter end.

The next day ‐- on June 13, 2008 ‐- Ernst & Young met with the Lehman Board Audit Committee but did not advise it about Lee's assertions, despite an express direction from the Committee to advise on all allegations raised by Lee.

Ernst & Young took virtually no action to investigate the Repo 105 allegations. Ernst & Young
took no steps to question or challenge the non‐disclosure by Lehman of its use of $50 billion of temporary, off‐balance sheet transactions.

Colorable claims exist that Ernst & Young did not meet professional standards, both in investigating Lee's allegations and in connection with its audit and review of Lehman's financial statements.

In total, the examiner collected in excess of five million documents, estimated to
comprise more than 40,000,000 pages

Although a handful of subpoenas were threatened and in a few cases served, ultimately Valukas received nearly all requested documents voluntarily.

In all, more than 250 individuals were interviewed....

[end excerpt]

Submitted by nora on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 11:02pm.
We are watching a subculture/CriminalClass (of about five percent of the population that is sociopathic and psychopathic) proceed to pursue a mini-imperialism WITHIN THE USA using Corporatist Profiteering, Corporatist Consolidation and Corporatist Privatization.
---------------
You are claiming, emphatically no less, that the entire population of sociopaths in the United States of America have united in a single purpose from within positions of power.

You are a fruit bat or an ignoramus or both. I would bet big money on both.

Apparently you are unaware that sociopaths do not cooperate with social groups in a common cause. That's why they are called sociopaths.

The idea of a subculture of cooperating sociopaths is as absurd as a wolf pack comprised of alpha individuals.

Furthermore, your statement implies that ordinary man-in-the-street sociopaths do not exist. According to you, the entire population of sociopaths in the United States is working in career positions from which they can devote themselves to a cause which you call mini-imperialism.

Your certainty will astound confidence men and three-card monte dealers.

When people use words inappropriately, it's obvious that they are trying to appear knowledgeable while they talk through their hats. You, nora, are chock-a-block full of shit.

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/media/view/?id=21ec8654-7088-4186-ab3...

Not even shared myth!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35821301/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/?GT1=43001[excerpt]

"The Pledge is constitutional," Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the majority in the 2-1 ruling. "The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our Republic was founded."

[end excerpt]

them."

-Lawrence O'Donnell

come across."

-James Ridgeway

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/opinion/12krugman.html?src=twr

The Winner of the 2010 Health Care Summit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuhfMWjHCkM
(Not very different from some current media coverage.)

Beany & Cecil go to No Bikini Atoll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGuG9LEIYkc
(Because I have a soft spot for Bob Clampett, Daws Butler and Stan Freberg.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxNl9WMyC70

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10068/1041225-28.stm#ixzz0hvrp2XzP

New York City officials have agreed to pay up to $657.5m (£437m) to thousands of rescue and clean-up workers at the Ground Zero site of the 9/11 attacks.

The settlement would compensate more than 10,000 plaintiffs who say they were made sick by dust from the collapsed World Trade Center towers.

At least 95% of the plaintiffs must approve the deal for it to take effect.

The money would come from a federally financed insurance fund of almost $1bn that the city controls.

A claims adjudicator, chosen by the lawyers involved in the case, would decide on the validity of each plaintiff's claim and how much compensation they were entitled to.
...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8563554.stm

A 50-year mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.
...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-b...

Just trying to keep the main thread clean, that's all.

http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5677#comment-399923

this is in response to crank's pedantic criticism of nora's post @ 11:02pm
yes, she was wrong to claim that "all" sociopaths have banded together
i think nora was just commenting on powerful cabals in general
that they're sociopathic in nature
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk
moreover, sociopaths are definitely welcomed in their ranks - after all, they dovetail perfectly
my gripe is that you used this careless error as a premise for the sole purpose of abusing nora

ok, let the response begin:
ever heard of a child sex ring, crank
ever heard of the mafia
ever heard of the cover ups in the catholic chuch
ever heard of birds of a feather, crank
you dumb fuck

that sociopaths don't converge is absurd, crank
(the big man who wants to defend the blog's integrity from absudity)

now go away, lick your wounds, sulk
but before you do, and i'm too bored to correct all your exaggerations...
//You are claiming, emphatically no less, that the entire population of sociopaths in the United States of America
have united in a single purpose from within positions of power.//

empahtically?
really?
when she writes
//of about five percent of the population that is sociopathic and psychopathic//
you class that as emphatic!
for a guy who considers himself a guardian against the corruption of words
you really are a jekyll & hyde character

this type of malignment you're waging against nora, crank
is the type that is rampant in the teabagger movement to malign obama
it's destructive & offends us to our core...
and so do you
now fuck off

so the o.g. was working for the cia...
back in the day, he spiked patrons beer in a pub with lsd

he was a cunt, and
as he freely admits, it was a cunt act
as we call it here

I might be able to form a new cat name out of this...

We have an Eva, (named after Evo Morales), we call her Eva Bean, because she has a tiny head...LaLa had a small head...she was the original bean...

My favorite lib. kid who I've known since he was 11 spoke to me today and his voice is changing...Then he told me he is sad all the time. I told him about hormones. Plus he said part of it is because his brother died in December...I also asked him if he eats sugar and soda and his face lit up and he said oh yes. I explained the drug effects of sugar and high fructose corn syrup to him...briefly.

then erase it before toni kicks your ass from this corner of the blog to the other...

:)

my anecdote about the o.g. spiking beers in a pub is one "sycopath" acting alone
ok, he had an accomplice...
they did it for kicks

and the cia spiking bread is an example of a clandestine operation
undertaken by an organization gathering data for purposes of control
and because it was officially sanctioned it was deemed ok...
they probably got a kick out of it, too

i use it sparingly
and i've explained that the word here
is generally reserved for blokes

anyway, why can't you femi-nazis leave me alone...
where's rush
help me
help me, rush
we're living under the tyranny of fem-bots

*

-In early March 1966, several media outlets, including The New Republic and the New York Times, alleged that GM had tried to discredit Nader, hiring private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past, and hiring prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations. Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case for $284,000. Nader's lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover "overzealous surveillance." -

I Wouldn't Treat a Dog the Way You Treated Me

...

pretend it's a typo...
he committed a cent act

so we're both in trouble...

a nasty degrading word when applied to women, to be sure
but written by me...
a cunt

but's what's worse
crank treating nora like a dog
(h/t to bobby bland)
or my bad word

I'm listening to Yvonne Elliman & The Sylvers...

..but I don't know...

tell me something...
do guys & gals in america use the c-word for guys

This may be a repost.

http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Regulation/McCain-revisiting-supplem...

[excerpt]

By Shane Starling, 08-Mar-2010

Arizona Republican Senator, John McCain, has indicated he may withdraw support for the Bill he sponsored in February that would have severely amended the way the US dietary supplements industry is regulated.

The Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 was introduced to widespread industry criticism last month by McCain and Byron Dorgan, a Democratic Senator from North Dakota. But now longtime pro-dietary supplements campaigner, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, is claiming McCain may be about to perform an about-turn.

Although some groups are claiming McCain has already withdrawn support for the Bill [s3002] and will work with Senator Hatch on some kind of ‘DSHEA enforcement Bill’, it remains listed on Thomas.gov, the online record of Bills introduced to Congress.

A spokesperson from Senator McCain’s office said the Senator was “revisiting” aspects of the Bill after listening to some of the criticism that had come in from various corners of industry as well as meetings with Senator Hatch.

But there were no immediate plans to withdraw the Bill as it stands, the spokesperson said.

However a March 4 letter – which can be found here – written by Senator Hatch describes a positive meeting between the 1994 Dietary Supplements and Health Education Act (DSHEA) author and McCain.

“…I want to thank you for agreeing to withdraw your support for the provisions of [s3002] that I believe would do great harm to dietary supplements industry…” Hatch wrote.

McCain’s Bill highlighted steroid contamination of sports supplements as a key motivator and sought to protect consumers with increased safeguards – something industry said already existed under DSHEA.

Assuming Senator McCain would withdraw his support for the Bill, Steve Mister, the president and CEO of the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) congratulated the Senator for taking a, “more measured, constructive approach to address his concerns regarding outlier products that contain illegal substances.”

“CRN appreciates Senator McCain’s receptiveness to the industry’s very real and very serious concerns about s3002 and our inability to support his bill. In addition, we think that FDA needs additional resources and CRN will work to support getting FDA additional resources to enforce the existing laws.”

However Daniel Fabricant, PhD, the Natural Product Association’s vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs, said it was not time to celebrate just yet.

“While the industry should be incredibly grateful and supportive of Senator Hatch, and his efforts in reaching out to Senator McCain on s3002, details of their working together have not yet been agreed to or specified, so much work still remains,” he said.

Caution required

Similarly, Virginia-based food industry attorney, Jonathan W Emord, praised industry lobbying efforts in gaining the ear of the Senator, but cautioned against complacency.

“Until McCain acts to withdraw his bill, people should continue to clamor against it,” said Emord. “If he withdraws it, consumers and industry must remain vigilant against attempts to revive or introduce a compromise version of it.”

“Any effort to increase the regulatory authority of FDA on the pretext that it must act against supplements sold as steroids will invite FDA to harm the law-abiding because the law already prohibits the sale of supplements as steroids.”

...

[end excerpt]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j1Km6AwEaE

He was promptly shunned and the whole party broke up...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E_7q4hzWFc

Interesting exchange here--

http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Regulation/McCain-defends-supplement...

[excerpt]

...

Senator McCain however said his Bill had been miscast and stated: “Opponents also claim the bill establishes a new regulatory structure for dietary supplements. That is completely false.”

Responding, the Alliance for Natural Health-US (ANH-US) said: “The broad regulatory framework for supplements at the moment is provided by DSHEA. McCain’s bill guts the protections provided by DSHEA and gives the FDA complete and arbitrary authority. If that isn’t a new regulatory structure, what is?”

The ANH-US pointed to Association of Poison Control Centers statistics that showed there were no dietary supplements-related deaths in 2008, the last year on record, despite claims from McCain that, “people have died from taking dietary supplements… and thousands have had to be hospitalized…”.

The bill can be found here .

Robust enforcement needed

Criticism of the Bill included that from founder and executive director of the American Botanical Council, Mark Blumenthal, who stated:

“It is understandable why legislators and others might feel the need to hold hearings and propose additional legislation to attempt to prevent or correct some of the problems in the dietary supplement industry.This includes the need to address problems of poor quality, intentional adulteration, exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims, and other excesses that exist in some pockets of the industry.”

He said the fact DSHEA had not in 15 years been, “adequately, uniformly, fully, and robustly enforced” fuelled the creation of such a Bill, but observed, “what is really needed is robust enforcement of existing laws and regulations, not more laws.”

...

[end excerpt]

===============================

POSTSCRIPT about threatened Poison Control Centers:

Since our nation's POISON CONTROL CENTERS and emergency hotlines save lives and collect data for statistics (stats like those mentioned above to show that no vitamin supplements caused fatality in 2008), it is disturbing to see the push to disband Poison Control Centers. WHY? The Poison Control Centers are obviously an integral part of the healthcare delivery picture, yet they are being put on the budgetary chopping block. Seems VERY odd to me. Don't the ones in charge of the pursestrings want to save lives? Don't those in charge want to collect data/statistics?

Schwarzenneger threatens to close Poison Control program:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/5486

Michigan Poison Control Center threatened with closure:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=69021104238

New Jersey could lose Poison Control center:
http://www.northjersey.com/news/health/other_health/84364322_Poison_educ...

Virginia Poison Control Center budget slashed:
http://www.nurseslegislativecoalition.org/advocacy-virginia-nursing-grou...

Poison Control Centers make sense:
http://www.safetypolicy.org/pm/poison.htm

And, don't think that your local hospital emergency room has the expertise to handle a poisoning:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.3614/pub_detail.asp

[excerpt]
PCCs provide state of the art emergency advice and treatment information to hospitals, police, and parents every day. PCsC also work with community groups to help with education, legislation and protections for consumers. In fact, PCCs have the largest database to monitor consumer products that people are often poisoned by. Not to put too fine a point on this, but virtually everyone can relate to the story of the 3-year-old who got into grandmom’s pocketbook when the adults left the room for “a second” and the child gobbled down the contents of the Zip Lock bag filled with the “water pill,” “sugar pill,” “heart pill,” “pain bill” and – well, you get the point. And who did the parent or ED physician call? PCC! One study showed that 90 percent of the people who called a PCC had the emergency managed over the phone by center staff (physician, pharmacologist, nurse, pharmacist).

Members of the public aren’t the only ones who rely upon PCC and toxicologist guidance. Health care professionals – from pediatricians and internists to emergency physicians and others – consult with PCC experts 1,400 times a day – 511,000 times a year. And while California’s state budget director thinks PCC can be replaced, consider patients managed with PCC expertise have shorter hospital lengths of stay (3.5 days) when sent to a HCF on the order of a full three days on average compared to patients managed by other than PCC guidance (6.5 days). Given the cost per day at a HCF, that represents more than 2100 in savings per patient. When PCC services were not available in one state for two years, the number of patients going to a HCF quadrupled. Do the math. It is penny wise and pound foolish to abandon PCC funding.

[end excerpt]

crank's soured my mood & exhausted me
it's times like this
that i wish i was the o.g.
to smash his face in

try this one
Pretty girl on the hood of a Cadilac, yeah....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JitDWQI9qc
(this at a training seminar, hence, the instructor's incredulous look)
(it's priceless)

Tomorrow I'm planning to make the library look perfect for the upcoming National Library Week April 11-17...

As Dewey is my witness I am shelving everything by myself tomorrow...Plus going to do a lot of things that are just going to get out of order between now and then anyway...but it will feel good for a minute...

It's bed time...xoxo

http://www.twbooks.co.uk/possumsprints/jpgs/frogfacedfoot27.jpg

...♥

good luck tomorrow

hey, don't laugh
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kutukBHiGS8
she got 524,501 views...
i love the look of concentration on her face
and there's a sweet note attached to it
...♥

for a more seasoned rock and roller
you can't go pass lemmy...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7beik6j_8
so when the weigh of the world is on your shoulders
let lemmy provide you with the right attitude
needless to say...
he's a role model of mine

...♥

The people in charge have screwy priorities...Just how greedy can humans get? They don't even want an endangered species to eat...Sheesh. There's weird choice of words used also -- like "eating too many salmon". That's what seals eat. At least humans can make an alternate food choice at their local supermarket. I don't get it. What with global climate heating, how are wildlife supposed to survive if we don't allow them anything of their habitat and food chain? Are humans incapable of backing off, to "live and let live"?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hBxxsWlviQ1IPQDQ_z4hrn...

[excerpt]

Sea lions killed for eating too many salmon
By ABBY HAIGHT (AP) – 3 days ago

PORTLAND, Ore. — Wildlife officials have tried everything to keep sea lions from eating endangered salmon, dropping bombs that explode under water and firing rubber bullets and bean bags from shotguns and boats. Now they are resorting to issuing death sentences to the most chronic offenders.

A California sea lion last week became the first salmon predator to be euthanized this year under a program that has been denounced by those who say there are far greater dangers to salmon — including the series of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia.

This is the second year of the program, which is administered by wildlife officials in Oregon and Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last year, 11 sea lions were euthanized. Another four were transferred to zoos or aquariums.

...

Two years ago, the National Marine Fisheries Service authorized Oregon and Washington officials to first attempt to catch the sea lions that arrive at the base of Bonneville Dam and hold them 48 hours to see whether an aquarium, zoo or similar facility will take them.

Otherwise, they could be euthanized, along with those that avoid trapping. Only California sea lions can be destroyed. Stellar sea lions cannot be killed because they are protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Supporters say the program works. The numbers of sea lions at the dam have dropped, although the 4,489 salmon they ate last year was the highest since tracking began in 2002.

Critics, led by the Humane Society of the United States, say that a far greater danger to salmon are hydroelectric dams on the Columbia, which are an obstacle to salmon both as they head out to sea and when they return from the ocean to spawn.

The Humane Society also says fishermen catch three times as many salmon as sea lions eat.

...

[end excerpt]

I Wouldn't Treat a Dog the Way You Treated Me
if it does...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P8IdHwLFzk

not that i was jealous
i'm not a jealous a guy
i'm just a c-word
guy

...♥

although, i prefer bryan (lemmy's brother) ferry's version
i choose the lennon video because he's banging my sister
and i don't like the ferry video
unlike this fat boy's video playing his renditon of fade to black
it's a beauty...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHjMMO3HclU
go fat boy

(walks quietly out the door, so not to disturb nora's research)

What time is it where you are, anyway?

The world here sleeps as I attempt to deal with my insomnia.

I'll turn in now too.

Michael Allen (journalist)

Hurry, before Mike has his second cuppa coffee and his head explodes!

"this machine kills fascists"

Senate Parliamentarian:
Submitted by toniD on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 10:40pm.

Senate Parliamentarian: House Must Move First
==
serena5401: RT @abettel: Senate parliamentarian telling hill staff GOP aides misinterpreted his opinion on health care + reconciliation process #hcr
30 minutes ago ago from web

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

:| re this Health Care BS...
THE COMPROMISE FROM SINGLE PAYER WAS TO BE PUBLIC OBTION!
...anything else is a "rethug" win...Why? WHY Why Prez O.?

How profound is it that on the day Harry Reid announces he's going forward with passing HCR via the Budget Reconciliation process, his wife and daughter are hospitalized after a pretty severe auto accident putting his wife in the ICU with a broken back!

Consider that the Republicans and AHIP are about to enter full on raging asshole mode to try and derial it.

I know he hasn't exactly been the ballsiest man in the room, but I'm guessing Reid's fuse is gonna be extra short over the next couple of weeks. I'm not sure fucking with the man is gonna pay dividends.

"this machine kills fascists"

Obama Delays Asia Trip for Health Care Bill
President Obama is delaying his Asia trip from March 18 to March 21 to work on health care, the AP reports.

This delay is most likely caused by the Senate parliamentarian, who according to The Hill, has ruled that President Obama "must sign the health care reform bill before Democrats can use special budget rules to pass changes demanded by the House."

House Democrats don't trust their Senate colleagues and probably want the president in town to keep the pressure on to pass the reconciliation fixes to the health care bill soon after the House votes.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/86297-senate-parliamentarian-raises-t...

toniD's Ya Think?

"Apparently you are unaware that sociopaths do not cooperate with social groups in a common cause.That's why they are called sociopaths."

"The idea of a subculture of cooperating sociopaths is as absurd as a wolf pack comprised of alpha individuals."

HAHAHAHA...bullshit...like he has never heard of the Mob...give me a break...there is no way he does not know this...he has to be after something else.

You make a poor con man Crank...what is your real objective here?...shit disturb maybe? Draw people into a shouting match again by being a total jerk? What are you looking for?

Were things here getting too peaceful for you?

Karl Rove defends waterboarding

A senior advisor to the former American president, George Bush, has defended harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, saying he was proud of the intelligence the US gained by using them.

Karl Rove said the use of waterboarding had helped prevent further attacks against America and its allies after the September the 11th attacks in 2001.

He said the technique - a form of simulated drowning - had been used only to break the will of three high-value terrorist suspects.

President Obama barred the use of waterboarding in January last year after defining it as a form of torture.

He spoke to the BBC's Claire Bolderson.

First broadcast 12 March 2010

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/03/100308_karl_rove_waterboa...
====================
Crank enjoys Rye bread that he leaves out on the kitchen table for months on end.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-b...

1.
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment - Telegraph
Mar 12, 2010 ... French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment ... contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. ...

I saw that prick Krauthammer on the tube this morning calling a Biden overrule of the Parliamentarian the "Thermonuclear Option"...

...'sides, I would think any over turning of a Parliamentarian opinion would probably open up a legal challenge by the Republicans and drag this thing out even further, so I don't think the white house will go that far...

brilliant Kewl Dude {...he just forgets that there are other WIZ "KIDS" 4 other issues, which he cannot speak about}. :D

but to speak about Crank B., IMHO, he started as a hero {as others did here too} -- to end as a "seemingly" negative but you know what is said about what 2 negatives equals... {HUMOUR ;)}
{or in my speak: I think a person, similar to "my sign" or as my husbands of darn near 25 years. If similar to hubby's then 1/2 the time we do not understand each other ... "eye-roll" teahee mwah haha
;) any errors Crank ;) oops & that is all ;D

It's not like Darth Cheney didn't use his power in the Senate to support his administration right out of the gate.

"Vice President Dick Cheney cast his first tie-breaking vote in the Senate on Tuesday, rescuing President Bush's budget plan from a Democratic effort to scale back the administration's $1.6-trillion tax cut proposal in order to increase funding for a new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Cheney cast his vote during debate on a budget resolution that includes the outlines of Bush's fiscal policy, including his tax cut plan."

And it's not like conservative propagandists didn't herald it as heroic!!

"this machine kills fascists"

My doctor was on his last day. He quit. Said he couldn't take the insurance and corporate doctor monopolies.

He's opened an office in South Dallas taking indigent patients and won't be accepting any insurance. His office visit is just about what I spend on co-pay. I told him to sign me up as his first patient.

You know it's bad when you have insurance but it's too cumbersome to use it.

Part of the Parliamentarian's job is to vet Senate procedure for Constitutional Legality...I do not think the thugs will let an over ruling pass without a legal challenge...even if only to foot-drag further... it is possible the whole thing could end up on hold until SCOTUS ruled on it...I am not sure Obama wants to go there.

take the deal
Submitted by dan on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 2:25pm.

"...throw in trashing kuccinich and its too much too bear."
I wouldn't worry about this much. Dennis will be getting the Wellstone farewell soon enough.

Obama delays Asia trip to deal with health care

President Barack Obama has delayed his visit to Asia, his first international trip of the year, to focus on the push to salvage health care legislation after a year of contentious debate.

The trip to Guam, Australia and Indonesia — the world's most populous Muslim country, where Obama spent several years as a youngster — will now run from March 21-26, rather than March 18-24, according to a senior administration official who spoke condition of anonymity because the White House hadn't announced the delay.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs had insisted that Congress act on health legislation by March 18 — Obama's original departure date. But the White House seemed to back off that as Democratic leaders tried to round up enough votes for passage of Obama's top priority.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8986639

"You know it's bad when you have insurance but it's too cumbersome to use it."

Looks like our puppets need a little more of your money--

Somali rebels attack Mogadishu for third day

Government tells residents to leave battle zone as al-Shabaab militia takes positions near presidential palace
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/12/somalia-mogadishu-rebel-atta...

Which one of our pathetic escapades will be the final straw?
We already domestic suicide bombers. It can't be much longer.

Live online: Michael Moore, Liberal Democrat spokesman on international development

Michael Moore, Liberal Democrat spokesman on international development, will be live online on the Katine Chronicles blog at 11am (GMT) on Tuesday, 16 March, to answer your questions about aid and development. Post a question

Find out more about the Liberal Democrats' policies
Live online:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/katine-chronicles-blog

US House Speaker Pelosi says public option will not be in final healthcare package - Reuters

taken from Organic Consumers Association newsletter

"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

-Edward Bernays, Pioneer of Corporate PR and Propaganda
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Takes one to know one
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q2/bernays.html

China's oil demand increase 'astonishing', says IEA

Source: BBC

China's demand for oil jumped by an "astonishing" 28% in January compared with the same month a year earlier, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.

The body added that demand for oil in 2010 would be underpinned by rising demand from emerging markets, with half of all growth coming from Asia. But the IEA predicted demand in developed countries would fall by 0.3%.

The IEA has increased its global oil demand forecast for 2010 by 1.8% to 86.6 million barrels a day. Oil prices are currently at their highest point for two months, with US light, sweet crude above $82 a barrel and Brent crude more than $80 a barrel.

Crude oil production by countries in the oil producers' cartel Opec rose to a 14-month high of 29.2 million barrels a day in February. During February, Iraq pumped an extra 115,000 barrels a day.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8563985.stm

toniD's Ya Think?

fernando, wifey and I have a psychologist friend who has been preaching exactly what your Doctor is doing for a long time... he wrote a book about how to get a practice out from under the managed care system...it is tough to get started, but at least you become your "own man"...

I can't imagine busting your ass for so long only to have to be told how to do your job by the pencil pushers and bean counters of the managed care system...

Noam Chomsky: Iran pursuing nuclear weapons out of fear
http://www.hlrecord.org/news/noam-chomsky-iran-pursuing-nuclear-weapons-...

...however, is someone getting "played"? :):(

You thought it would be?
"41 Senators Support Public Option...."
Proof, that at least, twenty senators know the PO would never be allowed in by the WH. Thus, no reason not to sign on, and demonstrate how "progressive" they really are.
This has been a great week for the corporate whores of the DNC. They drove Massa, suffering from "cancer," insane, and then used KOS to paint Kucinich as the enemy of health care "reform."

...this is a battle of will, now, not that it hasn't always been to a large extent, but both sides have staked everything on this bill..

If anything, I would agree that, given their penchant for capitulation, Obama and the Dems might not want to go there, but overruling the Parlimentarian is certainly within the purview of Biden's power as President of the Senate. At this point, this is a game of chicken. The republicans haven't hesitated to use every parlimentary trick in the book on top of churning out lie after lie about the bill.

This is just being set up as out of bounds by the MSM and Republican instigators along the lines of the whole "nuclear option" and "ramming bill down America's throats" rhetoric.

Consider this "reporting" from the First read crew over at MSNBC, our Liberal media, no less:

"Former parliamentarian Dove is technically correct when he says Vice President Biden, in his capacity as president of the Senate, could overrule the parliamentarian. But the chance of that happening is virtually none.

You might also remember that Senate Republicans flirted with a similar move to end the judicial showdown during Bill Frist's reign as majority leader. But a number of senior Republican senators objected.'

"no vice president has played an active role in the Senate since Humphrey"?!?

So, Dick Cheney casting the 51st vote three months into the Bush Presidency wasn't an active role in the Senate? He cast 8 tie-breakers over the course of Bush's two terms. In fact, Biden is one of only twelve VP's who have NEVER played an active role in the senate, so Veeps wielding power in Congress is far from uncommon.

Last I remember the Constitution awarded Veeps their power in the Senate specifically for the purpose of advancing an administration's agenda in the event of gridlock.

So, the Republican/MSM setup here is "not since Humphrey was president has this happened". But, that demonstrates that there is a precedent for this exercising of power within the arcana of the Senate rules, so a legal challenge would have to face the fact that a precedent has already been set.

"this machine kills fascists"

Howell Raines: Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?

By Howell Raines
Sunday, March 14, 2010; B03

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.

The American people and most of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today's Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care -- if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell's ideas on portability and tort reform.

It is true that, after 14 months of Fox's relentless pounding of President Obama's idea of sweeping reform, the latest Gallup poll shows opinion running 48 to 45 percent against the current legislation. Fox invariably stresses such recent dips in support for the legislation, disregarding the majorities in favor of various individual aspects of the reform effort. Along the way, the network has sold a falsified image of the professional standards that developed in American newsrooms and university journalism departments in the last half of the 20th century.

Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox's journalism of perpetual assault. I'm confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats.

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox's financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes's proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as being inferior to a "dead raccoon" in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It's as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only "elites" are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

Why has our profession, through its general silence -- or only spasmodic protest -- helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC. Some prominent print journalists are now cheering Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. (which owns the Fox network) for his alleged commitment to print, as evidenced by his willingness to lose money on the New York Post and gamble the overall profitability of his company on the survival of the Wall Street Journal. This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting.

Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher's political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation's airwaves to Murdoch's cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post. more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR201003...

PERMANENT AGGRESSION: War on the horizon in Latin America
.....ON THE VERGE OF WAR
The first official report outlining the defense and intelligence priorities of the Obama administration dedicated substantial attention to Venezuela. The Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community – which has mentioned Venezuela in years past, but not nearly with the same emphasis and extension – particularly signaled out President Chavez as a major “threat” to US interests. “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has established himself as one of the US’s foremost international detractors, denouncing liberal democracy and market capitalism and opposing US policies and interests in the region”, said the intelligence document, placing Venezuela in the same category as Iran, North Korea and Al Qa’ida.....
http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/03/permanent-aggression-war-on-horizon-in...

(March 12) -- The short list of nominees for this year's Nobel Peace Prize includes an unexpected contender: the Internet.

This is the result of a campaign launched by the Italian edition of Wired magazine. "The Internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy," explained Wired Italy Editor-in-Chief Riccardo Luna.

The news has ignited an online debate over whether the medium you're using now deserves such an honor, especially after last year's fuss over President Barack Obama getting the prize. (Please hold all jokes about nominating Obama's TelePrompTer this year.) But look at all the Web has given you just this week and the case becomes clear. What else besides the Internet offers so much to keep you peacefully occupied for hour after hour? Who wants to go out and start a war when you can sit in front of your computer and, for example, wallow in every detail of the Eric Massa scandal? Just don't tell Rep. Patrick Kennedy.

Let's review some of this week's news highlights -- all available to you through the miracle of the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Internet.

Quote of the Week No. 1
"Now they're saying I groped a male staffer. Yeah, I did. Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe, and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday." -- Ex-Rep. Eric Massa, D-N.Y., in a much-hyped interview with Glenn Beck on his Fox News show -- now sponsored by something like Jack's magic beans.

Quote of the Week No. 2
"America, I'm gonna shoot straight with you. I think I've wasted your time. I have wasted an hour of your time. And I apologize for that." -- Beck, concluding his much-hyped interview with Massa.

Quote of the Week No. 3
"It's been a long time since I watched cartoons with my kids, but I recall Scooby Doo as a pretty good character. He solved mysteries and caught the bad guys, pretty impressive -- especially for a dog." -- Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, commenting on a Republican fundraising presentation that likened him to the cartoon pooch.

Quote of the Week No. 4
"She wasn't no rocket scientist." -- Kurt Gorman, describing ex-girlfriend Colleen LaRose, aka "JihadJane," alleged online terrorist recruiter.

The same might be said for Megan Mariah Barnes, who made news this week because Florida police reported she crashed her car while shaving her bikini area on the way to Key West.

What is it about Florida and personal grooming issues?

"It has come out in news accounts he had a Republican Party of Florida credit card that he charged $130 haircut, or maybe it was a back wax -- we're not sure what he got at that place," Florida Gov. Charlie Crist claimed about Marco Rubio, his opponent in the GOP Senate primary. Rubio denied getting his back waxed.

The Internet also delivers counterintuitive medical research. This week's studies told us that people who smoke cigarettes for decades have a greatly reduced risk of Parkinson's disease and drinking alcohol can help keep women from gaining weight. more...

http://www.aolnews.com/the-point/article/why-the-internet-deserves-the-n...

toniD's Ya Think?

it is only an advisory part of the legislative process...but rejecting the Parliamentarian's procedural guidelines by it self is probably enough reason for the Supreme Court to accept the case should the thugs apply...whether or not the Republicans actually have a case is irrelevant...things will be held until a decision is rendered...

The point is they don't need to over rule the Parliamentarian to get the Bill passed, only to amend it before reconciliation without the House vote on the Senate Bill...

If the house votes on the Senate Bill as is, then they send it to reconciliation for adjustment...they won't have to deal with this....

...I'll tell you what though, this whole process has definitely been some NEXT LEVEL Civics Lesson shit...

Tea parties stir evangelicals' fears

The rise of a new conservative grass roots fueled by a secular revulsion at government spending is stirring fears among leaders of the old conservative grass roots, the evangelical Christian right.

A reeling economy and the massive bank bailout and stimulus plan were the triggers for a resurgence in support for the Republican Party and the rise of the tea party movement. But they’ve also banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background.

And while health care legislation has brought social and economic conservatives together to fight government funding of abortion, some social conservative leaders have begun to express concern that tea party leaders don’t care about their issues, while others object to the personal vitriol against President Barack Obama, whose personal conduct many conservative Christians applaud.

“There’s a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative,” said Bryan Fischer, director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association. “The tea party movement needs to insist that candidates believe in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage.”

“As far as I can tell [the tea party movement] has a politics that’s irreligious. I can’t see how some of my fellow conservatives identify with it,” said Richard Cizik, who broke with a major evangelical group over his support for government action on climate change, but who remains largely in line with the Christian right on social issues. “The younger Evangelicals who I interact with are largely turned off by the tea party movement — by the incivility, the name-calling, the pathos of politics.”

There’s no centralized tea party organization, and anecdotes suggest that many tea party participants hold socially conservative views. But those views have been little in evidence at movement gatherings or in public statements, and are sometimes deliberately excluded from the political agenda. The groups coordinating them eschew social issues, and a new Contract From America, has become an article of concern on the social right.

The contract, sponsored by the grass-roots Tea Party Patriots as well as Washington groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, asks supporters to choose the 10 most important issues from a menu of 21 choices that makes no mention of socially conservative priorities such as gay marriage and abortion.

“They’re free to do it, but they can’t say [the contract] represents America,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a veteran of the Christian right. “If they do it they’re lying.”

Groups such as FreedomWorks, said Perkins, bring a libertarian bias that doesn’t represent the “true tea parties.” Brendan Steinhauser, the director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks, responded that the contract represents activists’ priorities.
more...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34291.html

toniD's Ya Think?

44 italian sites recognized as humanity's world heritage by UNESCO have been photographed and included in an upcoming exhibition in Villa d'Este, Tivoli - which happens to be one of the sites

here are some of the photos (18 pictures)

wow

http://viaggi.repubblica.it//multimedia/gli-scatti-di-capuano-nell-itali...

this is from villa d'este - i am sure i must have been there and yet i don't remember, how's that possible?

ON Stephanie Miller' show today. Was that Hal Sparks knocking off Tweety?

i was not impressed by her appearance on rachel, were you?

That blank look and no-answer to the why impeachment off the table? and her health care spiel as well, not that impressive... so what's this that she said "no public option"? any more info about that?

They're making me so sick, sick to death with all these legislative shenanigans; it could have been so simple, really, it could have.... and it should have. At this point i really do wish nothing passes and obama deserves egg on face for this

Court OKs TV rules opposed by Comcast, Cablevision
1 hr 47 mins ago

WASHINGTON – A federal court has upheld regulations that require cable TV companies to make channels they own available to satellite TV providers and other rivals on equal terms.

Friday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia leaves in place the Federal Communications Commission "program access" rules. The ruling marks a setback for Cablevision Systems Corp. and Comcast Corp., the cable companies that had challenged the rules in court.

Comcast has nonetheless pledged to extend those rules to the local NBC and Telemundo stations it would control as part of its proposed combination with NBC Universal. Comcast is seeking FCC and Justice Department approval to buy a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100312/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_cable_access_rule...

toniD's Ya Think?

Spring Forward!

toniD's Ya Think?

i am going to scream

http://www.domenicarestaurant.com/restaurant-bar.html

i can't wait

the hardest part is deciding what to have

http://www.domenicarestaurant.com/pdf/Domenica-Lunch-Menu.pdf

I thought you were talking about Biden overruling the Parlimentarian's advice at any point during the Reconciliation process..that former Palimentarian that Chuck Todd and Samantha Guthrie interviewed certainly was emphatic about the clarity of the rules and the precedent set. It's just a matter of the will to use that power.

I also read that the Majority Leader can have the Parlimentarian replaced and that precedent for that is securely established, as well.

The bottom line is that various rules exist to benefit both sides. the Republicans have used and abused those rules incessantly. The Democrats have hardly flexed their muscle beyond filibustering here and there during Bush's presidency.

Personally, I'd love to see Biden come in and break some bones.

"this machine kills fascists"

Frittole di Fragole
strawberry and ricotta fritters with moscato zabaione

I had it the last time i was there and it was divine

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/pelosi-say-goodbye-to-t...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared the public option dead during a press briefing moments ago.

"We're talking about something that's not going to be part of the legislation," she said.

I'm quite sad that a public option isn't in there. But it isn't a case of it's not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It's not in there because they don't have the votes to have it in there."We had it," Pelosi said. "We wanted it. They didn't have it. It's not in the reconciliation."

this is mire's screaming at parlamentarian mention

please guys give it a break!

ok, go on, have at it, i am going to lunch, will bbl

really bad news

Congressional Democrats are confident that reports of a largely damaging ruling by the Senate parliamentarian with respect to passing health care reform were either overplayed by the press or misrepresented by Republicans.

On Thursday, news broke that the Senate parliamentarian told Republicans that the House of Representatives would have to pass the Senate health care bill -- and the president would have to sign it into law -- before either chamber could pass fixes through reconciliation.

The story, sourced solely to Republican aides, seemed to be a significant setback for Democrats, who want to assure skeptical House members that they can and will pass fixes to the Senate bill.

Now it seems that the parliamentarian's words were not so assertive. On Friday morning Congressional Quarterly reported that the Senate parliamentarian "later reportedly clarified his position to Senate aides, saying that the reconciliation bill could be written in a way that would not require Obama to sign the Senate bill into law before the reconciliation bill is voted on."

A Democratic aide, meanwhile, told the Huffington Post that it was their office's understanding that "the GOP misinterpreted his opinion on health care reform" -- though the aide would not elaborate.

eached at his Maryland home by HuffPost on Friday, Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin declined to comment.

In all likelihood, Frumin issued an advisory opinion rather than a definitive ruling about the sequence in which reconciliation can be used. For example, the option does exist that Vice President Biden, as president of the Senate, could rule that a reconciliation fix can pass through Congress without the health care bill it is designed to change being signed into law. The more common solution, as reiterated on Friday by a Democratic Hill aide, is that the party would attach a reconciliation fix bill to the base health care legislation on the condition that the latter is signed right before the former.
More here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/12/dems-confident-that-senat_n_496...

...Rethugs are worthless lot. The reason they are so greedy is because they have no moral value.

That's what I would have. MMMM!

toniD's Ya Think?

March 11th, 2010 4:30 PM
Dancing for Their Lives
Making an undercover visit to an Iraqi expat nightclub in Syria, where the refugee crisis's illicit economy is on full display.

By Deborah Amos / Foreign Policy

Um Nour checked her watch. It was close to midnight and my guide to the Iraqi refugee underworld in Damascus wanted to get to the nightclub so she could start making money. I had failed the dress test, attempting to camouflage myself in an alluring outfit and eliciting only a pursed-lips stare, but Um Nour's transformation was remarkable. I would not have recognized her on the street. On the many daytime occasions we had met during my reporting trips to Damascus in 2008, she dressed in baggy track pants, black hair tied back in a ponytail, her face lined and tired. This time, her long black hair was shiny and brushed with thick bangs that framed her face. She wore a tight-fitting black T-shirt sprinkled with sequins and black stretch pants tightly cinched at the waist. Her lipstick was deep red, her eyeliner heavy and black. She wore two rhinestone rings, her stubby fingers extended by fake red nails curled around an expensive cell phone.

Um Nour escorted me into the club, past men in black dinner jackets at the front door. Syrians owned the club, paid off the Syrian police when necessary, and called them in when there was trouble. Most of the clientele were Iraqis. The room was vast and dark, with spotlights trained on the dance stage. A live band played somewhere in the gloom behind the stage, making conversation almost impossible. There were at least a hundred tables. Most of the customers sat in small groups near the stage, drinking watered arrack and Johnnie Walker, sipping in the low haze of smoke from apple-infused tobacco in bubbling water pipes. Family groups sat farther back: mothers, fathers, and young daughters. Single women in their 20s and 30s had claimed seats in the darkest places, the better to survey the room. Um Nour picked a table near the back entrance, secured our spot, and gestured to the ladies' restroom. We had gotten past the Syrian owners, but I would have to fit in with the mostly Iraqi clientele.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the Iraqi exiles in Syria had turned to the sex trade for survival. In Damascus, refugees were not permitted to hold jobs. As resources dwindled, many were led into the underground economy. Female-headed households accounted for almost a quarter of the refugees registered with the U.N. refugee agency. Widowed, divorced, or separated from husbands by the war, many women had children or elderly parents to support. Sex was often their only marketable asset.

"I will never dance until I get so drunk," said a woman in a pink latex jumpsuit with clear-plastic shoulder straps that kept the tight fabric in place. She was bent toward the mirror in the ladies' room, applying eyeliner, next to a line of Iraqi women in the same pose. It was an utterly familiar female ritual: women gathering in front of a public bathroom mirror. It could have been anywhere, but for the outfits of tight fabrics and silver spandex revealing tactile, soft, full breasts served up for inspection. Clinging fabric over ample round backsides. Long skirts, slit to the thigh, bellies exposed. Gleaming black hair. High-heeled boots. Young faces. Curvaceous bodies. One last look? Enough eyeliner? Another pat of powder? Anxiety also filled the room, because of the deals that would have to be concluded later in the evening. One woman, maybe 20 but probably younger, was dressed as a schoolgirl. As we all prepared for the night ahead, the Iraqi women chatted, traded names and phone numbers. They flipped open cell phones and showed the pictures of their young children. Lingering together in this comfortable female place, homesick, they were preparing to live off their bodies.
Read on:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/dancing-their-lives

You picked the wrong time to hate the word "parlimentarian", mire...you might want to plug your ears for the next two or three weeks...I don't pass up opportunities to learn about "NEXT LEVEL Civics Lesson shit"! :)

"this machine kills fascists"

...sorry mire, didn't mean to spoil your lunch...

for me this is the best part of the trip...the nuts and bolts of our system...well, usually, more "nuts" than bolts...but we are seeing things we have never seen in our Government before, at least not so publicly, so it is educational if not all interesting...

yeah, deep down, I AM A WANNA BE CIVICS NERD...and proud of it. :)

.

:)

Submitted by 60th Street on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 1:45pm.

NEXT LEVEL Civics Lesson shit"! :)

Guardian UK:

There are lies, damned lies and investment bank balance sheets. It's always been a puzzle how Lehman Brothers was able to spout reassuring figures on declining indebtedness and healthy underlying trends until the day it collapsed, sending the global financial system into a near-apocalyptic meltdown.Now, thanks to bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas's exhaustive 2,200-page "autopsy" of the bank, we have a clearer idea of how Dick Fuld and his team disguised the 158-year-old firm's desperate predicament and carried on trading through weeks of insolvency.

The term "Repo 105" will take its place in the annals of big-brained, misguided Wall Street distortions. It was a trick allowing Lehman to sell packages of mortgages, Treasury bonds, Eurobonds, even Canadian government instruments, on a temporary basis at the end of an accounting quarter, with an obligation to buy them back a few weeks later. The deals, amounting to $50bn, allowed Lehman to publish healthier accounts than it really had.

People within the bank knew this was a sleight of hand. In one exchange of emails, a senior Lehman executive wrote: "It's basically window-dressing." A colleague replied: "I see...so it's legally do-able but doesn't look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?" One of Fuld's top lieutenants, chief operating officer Bart McDade, referred to Repo 105 as "another drug we're on". A US law firm didn't like the look of the practice, so Lehman turned to Britain's very own Linklaters, which duly signed it off as lawful. London-based auditor Ernst & Young concurred, taking "virtually no action" when a Lehman whistle-blower, Matthew Lee, raised a red flag.

More observations of the sorry mess here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/12/lehman-brothers-repo-105-...

I simply want to reduce them to the size where I can drag them into the bathroom and drown them in the toilet.

wow 400,000

BIG little bloggy.

Here's hoping we go to 4,000,000...

It's been a wild morning here! Phone calls from my fellow workers because are boss is having one on one meetings with us and they are all worried. This is something new and as one of the girls said to me this AM, what's with the one on ones for a part time job at the Park District? This started from last Friday when our boss told us all. How to stress out the work force! My one on one is tonight. The choice of words makes it sound like a fight doesn't it?

It's all because of the Woman hired for Marketing that thinks we should run the PD like a corporation. We have to wear Logo clothing now too!

And then my friend Rita called. She's trying to get disability because she will be 62 with no job prospects and is worried about insurance. She's got diabetes, bad knees, breast cancer survivor, and high blood pressure. If she gets disability, she will automatically get medicare and would be covered for insurance. Plus she'd get her full retirement benefits from SS instead of early retirement which is less money.

toniD's Ya Think?

UBS, the Swiss bank at loggerheads with the US Internal Revenue Commission over tax, has written to Swiss politicians claiming that, if proposals to overrule a court decision do not go through, it could affect the country's economy.

UBS and the Swiss Government want Switzerland’s Parliament to get rid of a distinction between tax evasion and tax fraud in Swiss law, which is stopping UBS from handing over data on 4,450 clients suspected of tax evasion to the US taxman.

If the deal to change the law, negotiated between Switzerland and the US in August, does not go through, UBS runs the risk of criminal charges in the US. Swiss law allows the sharing of bank information with other countries in cases of tax fraud but not tax evasion.

More here:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_...

toniD's Ya Think?

Anti-competitive practices in the food sector will stop

During the Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s opening round-table discussion, it quickly became clear that the changing landscape of the nation’s farm country -- and growing concerns over the consolidation of the food sector -- was a key area that had grabbed regulators and prosecutors’ attentions.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack pointed out that, back in the 1920s, a single farmer grew enough crops or raised enough livestock to feed 20 people. “Now,” he said, “a single farmer is responsible for feeding 150 people. Farming makes up 1 out of every 12 jobs in this country.”

But only 11% of the nation’s economic income is earned by family farmers, Vilsack said. It was a discrepancy, he said, that “needs to be examined.”

More here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2010/03/doj-usda-workshop-iowa-...

had anything to do with the car accident that Reid's wife and daughter were in?

Top Insurance Lobbyist Says Industry Won’t Point Fingers, Then Blames Hospitals For Higher Premiums

During the AHIP’s insurance conference on Tuesday, AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni claimed that health insurers were “very concerned about insurance premiums and the trajectory” of health care spending and promised that the industry remained committed to controlling costs. “We understand that begins also with us. So we are fully committed to cost containment,” Ignagni said.

But just several hours later, on Fox Business’ Neil Cavuto, Ignagni blamed hospitals, doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry for rising costs. Ignangni also falsely claimed that insurers cannot negotiate prices with providers:

IGNAGNI AT 10 AM: “So we are fully committed to cost containment, not finger pointing to other sectors.”

IGNAGNI AT 6PM: “Health care costs are surging. We have our health plans Neil, that are getting quotes from hospitals of up to, they want 40% increases, we see pharmaceutical prices surging. We see tests increasing, exploding…we’ve had consolidation of the hospital arena.”

Watch a compilation:

Ignagni’s hypocrisy exemplifies the industry’s two-pronged strategy of publicly supporting reform while secretly funding efforts to undermine it. Similarly, while the industry’s “charm campaign” has argued that insurers would “lead the charge” on supporting insurance reforms and controlling costs, insurers have continued rescinding policies and increase rates. In August, the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations investigated insurance practices and concluded that far from “leading the charge” on reform, Assurant Health, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint have “continued to rescinded policies for almost 20,000 individual insurance policyholders” and avoided paying more than $300 million in medical claims” over the last five years.

Ignagni isn’t entirely wrong in arguing that large provider groups use their market leverage to raise reimbursement rates and increase health care costs. But her claim that insurers can’t lower these rates through negotiation is wrong. In fact, at the insurers’ own conference, Mark Miller — executive director of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) — took insurers to task for overpaying hospitals and doctors and criticized the industry for failing to use their market power (in areas of high market concentration) to secure lower reimbursement rates.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/12/ignani-point-hospitals/

toniD's Ya Think?

Submitted by cent on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 9:52am.
"Apparently you are unaware that sociopaths do not cooperate with social groups in a common cause.That's why they are called sociopaths."

"The idea of a subculture of cooperating sociopaths is as absurd as a wolf pack comprised of alpha individuals."

HAHAHAHA...bullshit...like he has never heard of the Mob...give me a break...there is no way he does not know this...he has to be after something else.
------------------------
Look it up. Check every dictionary and encyclopedia and medical resource you can find. The definitions vary because different groups apply differing nomenclature to personality disorders and their degrees of severity and proclivities but there is an underlying theme which carries throughout: Sociopathy is marked by a unique set of rules, morals and self-interest. It is the singularity of the sociopath, not the commonality, which sets him apart. In most cases the disorder can be traced from childhood.

The mob is not comprised of sociopaths. Neither army in a war is comprised of sociopaths. Organizations having hierarchies, strict rules and unyielding cooperation are not comprised of sociopaths. People who comfortably comply in societal organizations are as different from sociopaths as they can possibly be.

You are wrong, cent, which is not unusual when you don your Tough Guy persona and disengage your brain. You are so intent on riding your white horse in to save the day, it makes you incapable of recognizing that nora is a blowhard who will state anything that strikes her fancy to support her paranoid positions.

Before your arrival, there was a discussion of sociopathy on this blog which lasted for weeks and included source wars and at least a half-a-dozen participants. I have read more about antisocial personality disorders in the past few years than nora has in a lifetime. The experts don't agree on the finer points, but they all agree that sociopaths place their sense of self sharply apart from other living creatures.

It is cheezy and craptastic and small-minded for anyone to accuse a group of people they don't like of being sociopaths. I guarantee that, when you see it being done, you are reading a weak argument not worth your time. Even the Aryan Brotherhood is comprised of different personality types. No group can be gang-diagnosed.

I can say unequivocally that sociopaths, regardless of the definition to which you ascribe, do not form their own societies in the furtherance of a common goal. Sociopaths do not happily accept assignation within a hierarchy. Sociopaths do not cheerfully follow rules imposed by others. The dumbest thing you can do is trust a sociopath to be a team member.

According to nora, all (and then, after she edited her post, most) of fifteen million sociopaths have joined together to further their cause of mini-imperialism (and corporatism and oligarchism and fascism and whatever other shiny word object attracts her bass-like attention).

That's bullshit. It is pure, unadulterated, likes-to-hear-herself-talk, pulled-it-out-of-her-ass crap.

By the way, cent, the Catholic school I attended was loaded with Mafia kids. You are a fool if you believe that the kids and their parents were sociopaths.

A sociopath is not defined as occupying a position in a societal structure that you find distasteful. Japanese soldiers were not sociopaths simply because they were on the other team. Hells Angels bikers did not repudiate societal membership; they merely designed a society different from the one they were born into. Even the Stockholm syndrome does not create sociopaths; Patty Hearst switched her societal affiliation to the SLA without becoming a sociopath.

How many examples of different kinds of societies do you need before you understand that sociopaths don't function by societal rules and they sure as hell don't gather together in cooperation to create their own societies?

Look it up. Don't take my word for it. The information is easy to find.

If you can find one reputable source which states that a particular group of people (Rotarians, Baptists, Ecuadorians, vegetarians, gangbangers, hockey fans, etc.) is comprised entirely of sociopaths, I will eat your goddammed tin foil hat.

I will eat two of your tin foil hats if you can find a reputable source which identifies a functioning society that is comprised entirely of sociopaths.

I will eat three of your tin foil hats if you can get your wife to go on record with a diagnosis stating that all Mafia members were, are, and will be sociopaths.

While you are at it, look up iconoclast and eccentric and rebel and outlaw and all of the synonyms listed for each. Your concept of "different" needs to be expanded beyond someone needing medical attention.

Health Reform Myths
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

Which brings me to the third myth: that health reform is fiscally irresponsible. How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/opinion/12krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&...

toniD's Ya Think?

Submitted by taozen on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 12:45pm.

*******

It was John Fugelsang..

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

Obama heading to Ohio
President Obama will travel to Ohio Monday, his third trip in a week to build support for his proposed health care overhaul – and coincidentally the third trip to a key battleground state in both this year’s Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election.

Obama will go to Strongsville, Ohio, south of Cleveland...

Read more: http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2010/03/obama-heading-to-ohio-.h...

"Obama not only verbally promised voters there a NAFTA re-do, he did it in writing. “Bad Trade Deals Hit Ohio Harder Than Most States and Only Barack Obama Consistently Opposed NAFTA,” declared an Obama campaign leaflet picturing a shuttered factory.

“He made those statements in the Youngstown area,” Kaptur recalled. “And when these words are heard, they mean something. Now people are waiting for the results of that.”

In December, Obama decided to appoint Kirk to the job of U.S. trade representative. The former mayor of Dallas is a vocal supporter of NAFTA, as trade with Mexico has created jobs in Texas and a steady stream of truck traffic through his city.

In February, anti-NAFTA Democrats bent Obama’s ear on the matter at the Democratic retreat in Williamsburg, Va. To their horror, one witness said, Obama listened to their arguments, then simply blurted out “We can’t stop trade.”

An undeterred Democrat responded, “The option isn’t no trade, it’s balanced trade.”

But as comprehensive reform for health care and energy consume the legislative calendar, optimism for a NAFTA rewrite is fading.
“There is no way the Obama administration is going to reopen NAFTA,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential candidate and staunch opponent of the trade agreement. “The candidates always say that.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama-backs-away-from-reformi...

Floor Amendments Would Quickly Show If Public Option Has the Votes

Now that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has sent out his spokesman to lie for him to obscure that Durbin plans to whip against the public option, the hot potato has been passed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Pelosi is saying she will not include the public option because it does not have the votes in the Senate. From The Hill:

Pelosi's comments throw a wrench into liberal efforts to reintroduce it to the bill. She shut the door on a possible pathway opened by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who said earlier on Friday that he would "aggressively" push senators to vote for the plan if the House included in the fixes.

"We had it, we wanted it...it's not in the reconciliation," Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing. "It isn't in there because [the Senate doesn't] have the votes to have it in there."

If only there were some magical tool of Democracy to find out if some provision had majority support in both chambers! Oh, wait, there is, and it is called a floor amendment!

Offer a public option floor amendment to the reconciliation bill in the House and the Senate. If it gets a majority in both chambers, we will know if it has the votes to pass or not. If it does, Americans will get the public option they strongly want. If it fails, at least Americans will get to learn which members of the House and Senate decided to vote to protect the profits of the private health insurance companies. (House and Senate progressives could agree to switch their votes at the very end of the roll call if the amendment only got a majority because Republicans voted for it in an attempt to cause mischief.)

It is amazing what hoops Democrats will jump through to stop accountability. If we are denied the ability to find out how our representatives would actually vote, are we even a “Democracy” anymore? Americans have the right to know. No more lies, no more hiding behind mythical votes that may or may not exist.

Frankly, until Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid offer floor amendments to prove that the public option does not have the votes, I will not believe them. After all, if the public option did not have the votes in the Senate, why would Durbin and Reid need to whip against it?

http://jwalkerreport.blogspot.com/2010/03/floor-amendments-would-quickly...

"this machine kills fascists"

Public Option Dying For What, 12th Time? 13th?

If the Senate actually wanted to pass a public option through reconciliation, it could be done, without much of a hot fuss. But (according to the easiest path) that would first require Nancy Pelosi to put one in the House reconciliation package, and she’s like nuh-uh: “‘We’re talking about something that’s not going to be part of the legislation,’ she said… ‘We had it,’ Pelosi said. ‘We wanted it. They didn’t have it. It’s not in the reconciliation.’”

Can’t blame her. She knows that this 40- or 41-person public option petition going around the Senate is pure Senate loser ass-covering opportunistic parchment of lies. It seems clear (maybe) that this petition is designed to die around 42 signatures — after the Senators who need it to build up their “liberal cred” have signed on, but before it reaches 47 or 48, at which point by god the Senate might actually be pressured into doing something about it! NEVER.

And so the Senate would find some way to weed it out of their reconciliation package, which would force the House to vote on the package again and send it back to the Senate, where yet another fat, crucial aristocratic bastard would complain about an instance of comma misuse or something and demand that the House fix this and revote again, like bitches.

There are probably three or four Senators who honestly want a public option.

http://wonkette.com/414200/public-option-dying-for-what-12th-time-13th

toniD's Ya Think?

WASHINGTON — The government's top securities regulator called Thursday for Congress to impose new oversight on financial derivatives, warning that allowing risky instruments like credit default swaps to continue unfettered could bring further economic damage.

The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro, said banks that deal in the swaps must be subject to rigorous requirements for holding capital. They must also conduct their business in accordance with rules and their price information must be transparent, she said.

Schapiro made the statement as credit default swaps, a form of insurance against loan defaults, have come under heightened scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe.

The leaders of France, Germany and Greece have called for a clampdown on trading in the swaps, which they blame for worsening Greece's debt crisis and undermining the European currency in recent weeks. A nationwide strike in Greece to protest the cash-strapped government's austerity measures – the second strike in a week – brought the country to a virtual standstill Thursday.

Another U.S. regulator, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, said Wall Street banks are seeking exemptions to the proposed new regulations for derivatives that could shield more than half the trades that should be subject to disclosure. Gensler criticized Wall Street's stance on proposed oversight for the shadowy $600 trillion market for derivatives – blamed for hastening the 2008 financial crisis.

Credit default swaps account for an estimated $60 trillion of the worldwide derivatives market.

Gensler told a financial industry gathering in Florida that Wall Street has not been "enthusiastic" about the proposed new regulations now before Congress.

Schapiro didn't specifically address the Greek situation or the call by European leaders for restraints on swaps trading, in her response to a question from The Associated Press. On Tuesday, the European Commission threatened to ban speculative trading of credit default swaps by investors who don't actually own a country's underlying debt – known as "naked" trades.

Referring to credit default swaps generally, Schapiro said in the statement: "If we continue to allow these risky financial products to operate in the dark we should not be surprised at the damage we find when the lights come on. That's why it is so important for Congress to bring ... derivatives under the regulatory umbrella."
Story continues below

In addition to capital requirements that are needed for dealers in the swaps, regulators and market players "must have access to information to know what is being traded, at what price and in what volume," Schapiro said. "And regulators must have the tools to police the markets, including monitoring trends and writing rules to address abuses."

The collapse of credit default swaps nearly toppled American International Group Inc. in the fall of 2008, prompting the government to support the insurance conglomerate with about $180 billion in aid.

Gensler, in several speeches in recent days, has been renewing his call for new regulation aimed at bringing transparency to, and prevent manipulation in, the sprawling global derivatives market. At his address Thursday to the meeting of the Futures Industry Association in Boca Raton, Fla., he also got in some mild barbs at Wall Street.

Billions in trading profits for the big investment banks could be threatened by new rules for derivatives, which passed the House in December as part of the overhaul of financial regulation and is now before the Senate. Many in the financial industry have indicated support for requiring derivatives trades to go through clearinghouses, "that is, as long as it only applies sometimes," Gensler said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/12/credit-default-swaps-sec-_n_496...

toniD's Ya Think?

John Fugelsang.. got me laughing so hard for a moment that I forgot that I am getting screwed by the big business interests who own our politicians

Health Care Vote Likely Next Week
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her members "to brace themselves for a climactic health care vote as early as next week, warning them to clear their schedules for next weekend and promising to stay in session until the landmark vote, people present said afterwards," Politico reports.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34335.html

Noting that President Obama postponed a trip to Asia until March 21, Pelosi said, "I am delighted the president will be here for the passage of the bill. It is going to be historic."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/03/12/obama_delays_asia_trip_for_...

Roll Call: "Pelosi said the House would enact the Senate health care bill and then make changes to that measure by passing a reconciliation bill, which will also reform the student loan program."

http://www.rollcall.com/news/44130-1.html

toniD's Ya Think?

I had luckier childhood. The Catholic school I attended was loaded with horny chicks. They were easy to spot: Too much mascara, and sometimes commando on the monkey bars.

Catholic school girls have thrown away their mascara
They chain themselves to the axles of big Mac trucks
The sky is filled with herds of shivering angels
The fat lady laughs, "Gentlemen, start your trucks"

Texas ed board adopts social studies standards

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Texas State Board of Education preliminarily adopted new social studies standards Friday after days of heated debate marked by race and politics, shaping what teachers will be required to cover in social studies, history and economics classes for millions of students for the next decade.

(hint: the conservatives won)

From the comments at http://twitpic.com/1858uk

MissyRayMills on March 12, 2010

Good news guys....problems solved...we've been annexed by Canada.

Clinton Sends Tough Message to Israel

Source: NY Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A senior U.S. official says Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to complain bluntly about Israel's announcement this week of new housing settlements in East Jerusalem.

The official said Clinton spoke with Netanyahu Friday ''to deliver a very strong message with regard to events over the past week.'' She said that Israel is expected to take actions to improve the prospects for relaunching peace talks with the Palestinians. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the call.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/12/us/politics/AP-US-US-Mideast....

toniD's Ya Think?

Universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate

Countless arguments have been advanced for and against the pending bills to increase health-care coverage. Both sides have valid concerns, which makes the battle tight. But one prominent argument is illogical. The contention that opponents of abortion should oppose the current proposals to expand coverage simply doesn't make sense.

Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions -- a fact proven by years of experience in other industrialized nations. All the other advanced, free-market democracies provide health-care coverage for everybody. And all of them have lower rates of abortion than does the United States.

This is not a coincidence. There's a direct connection between greater health coverage and lower abortion rates. To oppose expanded coverage in the name of restricting abortion gets things exactly backward. It's like saying you won't fix the broken furnace in a schoolhouse because you're against pneumonia. Nonsense! Fixing the furnace will reduce the rate of pneumonia. In the same way, expanding health-care coverage will reduce the rate of abortion.

At least, that's the lesson from every other rich democracy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR201003...

toniD's Ya Think?

The Biography of a Taco
Snippet:
"Food that is mass-produced does not necessarily have the carbon footprint we may assume, even taking into account transportation. But labor practices and benefits to the regional economy may persuade some to continue their pursuit of locally grown food."
http://missionlocal.org/2010/03/the-biography-of-a-taco/

The Great Taco Hunt
A guide to the Los Angeles taco scene
http://www.greattacohunt.com/

California Taco Trucks
http://californiatacotrucks.com/blog/

Later. I have a sudden desire to chop tomatoes, onions, chilis and cilantro.

Submitted by ghettodefender on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 3:04pm.
The Catholic school I attended was loaded with horny chicks.
---------
At my school Irish and horny were synonymous.

you had me at tomatoes. trouble is i always thought cilantro tasted like soap.

Texas Approves Curriculum Revised by Conservatives

Source: New York Times

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the role of Christianity in American history and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 11 to 4, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting for the curriculum, and four Democrats voting against.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has been diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?hp

toniD's Ya Think?

Why Are We Afraid to Tax the Super-Rich?

Our nation is already deeply in debt. How can we possibly afford to invest in our infrastructure, renewable energy, health care, our schools -- and create the millions of jobs that our unemployed desperately need?

We are told that we're already living well beyond our means -- that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security will bankrupt us. Forget the solar panels, the smaller classes and the new jobs -- we've got to cut back on government programs at all levels.

Meanwhile, the super-rich are still having a ball. In his annual shareholder letter, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote, "We've put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it's raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble." And Forbes Magazine adds, "Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year."

Which brings us back to the federal budget. There are two sides to every ledger: the expenses...and the income. We need to start looking at the income side. With a fairer tax system, we could retrieve some of that money downpour that the elite has been siphoning away from us for decades.

In the 1950s the marginal tax rate on those earning more than $3 million a year (in today's dollars) was 91 percent. By 1990 it was 28 percent. The IRS says that the top 400 richest tax filers actually paid a rate of just 16 percent in 2007 (the latest numbers we have). Yep, the richest earners -- people who took in an average of $343 million each -- probably paid a lower rate than you did. Something to consider as you sign your 2009 return.

By the way, those 400 people who do so well on tax day have a combined net worth of nearly $1.37 trillion. (According to Forbes Magazine their wealth has gone up on average by more than 16 percent over the past year -- the worst economic year since the Great Depression during which 29 million Americans are without work or forced into part-time jobs. )

How do we even wrap our minds around a number so large? Here's the example that brings it down to earth for me. If we had progressive taxes that reduced their wealth to a trifling $100 million each, we'd have enough money to set up a trust fund whose interest could provide tuition-free higher education for students at every public college and university in perpetuity. Imagine that. Our kids could actually leave college without carrying tens of thousands of dollars of debt on their backs.

Could those 400 special people be able to get by on just $100 million a year? I think they might.

So why are we so fearful of taxing the super-rich? Here are the arguments I've heard.

1. They've earned it.
Really? The concept of "earning" is murky when you consider the array of corporate welfare programs we provide. Oil companies have their depletion allowances. Big sugar farmers have their sweet subsidies. The health insurance industry is exempt from anti-trust laws.

One way corporations spend their welfare checks is by providing top management with mind-boggling compensation packages. For instance, in 2009, our financial wizards netted about $150 billion in bonuses - as if in reward for crashing the economy. Were it not for our $10 trillion (not billion) in bailout funds, they would have earned nothing at all. In fact, the financial sector's reckless gambling has lost us over $6 trillion in wealth. But the execs did quite well, thanks to taxpayer largesse.

You'd think we'd be crying out for a windfall profits tax to reclaim our money. But no.

2. Redistribution of Income is Un-American.
During the 2008 campaign, Joe the Plumber got his 15 minutes of fame when he slammed Obama for daring to utter the phrase "redistribution of income." Of course, we redistribute income primarily through progressive taxation - having the rich pay a higher rate.

Joe didn't mention that we already live in a world of massive redistribution. Only it's from the bottom to the top. We still hear about how poor folks game the system and mooch off our hard earned tax dollars. They go to emergency rooms and don't pay. They get Medicaid for free. And many don't pay any taxes at all (mostly because their incomes are so impossibly low). But all of that is chump change compared to the gaming going on at the other end of the economic scale.

Just think of all the scams corporations and the rich are running: ever-rising credit card fees, predatory mortgages, usurious interest rates, check cashing ripoffs, monopoly pricing. They turn income into lower taxed capital gains, find offshore tax shelters, collect subsidies for their runaway shops. And then they netted the big one: Wall Street bailouts. Post-baillout, these too-big-to fail companies are getting even bigger. It all adds up to a major redistribution plan -- from the many to the few. more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/why-are-we-afraid-to-tax_b_496...

toniD's Ya Think?

Brad Hintz, Former Lehman CFO: Firm's Accounting Practices Filled With 'Shenanigans' (VIDEO)

In an interview with Bloomberg Television this morning, former Lehman Brothers CFO Brad Hintz condemned the firm's executives for camouflaging its ballooning balance sheet as the financial crisis set in.

(Read more about the Lehman accounting scandal here.)

Hintz, who left Lehman in the late 1990s, called 'Repo 105' -- the accounting technique the highly leveraged firm used to conceal $50 billion in assets -- "shenanigans":

"No, it wasn't done at the other firms, so it was clearly an accounting technical approach in order to bring a balance sheet down. But you're not bringing the balance sheet down... If all you're doing is hiding behind a curtain, it's not there."

Hintz said that what shocked him most was how long Lehman waited just to address its balance sheet:

"The comments about shrinking Lehman's balance sheet really wasn't something that occurred until well after the crisis began, which if you're facing a funding or confidence crisis, the first thing you do is put your balance sheet into a nose dive and raise cash."

He remembered the accounting systems the firm used in the 1990s were "primitive," and the problem of excessive leverage reached back to at least his days at the firm, he added. But former CEO Dick Fuld, who may face criminal charges over the scandal, was always "a very forceful personality" who was heavily involved in managing the firm's risk: "It's hard for me to see him giving up the risk side," Hintz said.

WATCH:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/12/brad-hintz-former-lehman_n_4967...

toniD's Ya Think?

reminds me of a brand of cigarettes very popular in Italy at a time when i was still smoking; in fact there was this woman i worked with who was smoking this brand; i just happened not to like this woman very much... she was smoking the lights

The Sunday Show Line-Ups
Eric Kleefeld | March 12, 2010, 3:25PM

Here are the line-ups for the Sunday talk shows this weekend:

• ABC, This Week: White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

• CBS, Face The Nation: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), America's Health Insurance Plans President Karen Ignagni.

• CNN, State Of The Union: House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod.

• Fox News Sunday: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), former Bush White House Senior Adviser Karl Rove.

• NBC, Meet The Press: White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), former Bush White House Senior Adviser Karl Rove.

toniD's Ya Think?

but if you really are that naive, it explains a lot about your world view, and why you have so much trouble even entertaining the possibility of conspiracies...

"Apparently you are unaware that sociopaths do not cooperate with social groups in a common cause.That's why they are called sociopaths."

"The idea of a subculture of cooperating sociopaths is as absurd as a wolf pack comprised of alpha individuals."

Your words Crank, not mine...wifey, the Clinical Psychologist, and I, are laughing at you...

"trust" has nothing to do with it Crank... anyone who has studied sociopaths/antisocial personalities would know they congregate especially for one reason..BECAUSE THEY WANT SOMETHING...and the do it ruthlessly, but with a smile on their face....until they are done with you ...in fact the most common treatment for them is through "token economy" because, as being without a "conscience" is their primary symptom, taking their wealth is the most effective way to make them understand the concept of loss...

They will cooperate as long as it is in their individual best interests to do so...which fits nicely into what nora was trying to tell you...I am not agreeing with her post per se, as much as COMPLETELY DISAGREEING with the absurdity of your statement that sociopaths do not socialize for the perpose of gain...that is the ONLY reason they do so...it is clear you have no clue what you are talking about here Crank...funny too, considering your grand statement yesterday about admitting when you were out of your depth on a subject...this topic is not one you can truly learn about simply by reading, dude...you can't fake it.

As far as the common parlance "definition" of the term goes Crank, we both know even a cursory google produces enough corroboration of my "interpretation" of the word...never mind my personal and professional experiences with antisocial personality disorder types...so, bluff someone else...and the burden of finding an organization entirely comprised of pure sociopaths is a little rigid even for one with your anal retentive requirements...and your statement that I replied to made no such requirements or qualifications...this is a pattern of yours I am on to, whenever you get nailed on a dumb statement, you get embarrassed and try to redefine the argument....not this time, bud.

in short Crank, just be a mensch and own the stupidity of your statement, or don't...but either way, run your game on someone else...cause I ain't buying it...like I am not buying your other MO of ad hominem mischaracterizations...like the one of my "tough guy persona" that you seem to whip out like a trump card whenever run out of argument...this is not a persona, it is how I talk...the other guy is the persona, the educated one, that is more of who I would like to become, but this guy, the Brooklyn boy, this is who I am...you don't like my personality? too bad...I'm not hurting anyone, and I don't ask you to drop your pseudo-intellectual professorial persona or Comedian\Clown schtick...so just live and let live, and drop the insults, okay?

I really would like to avoid another recurrence of this cycle we keep getting stuck in.

while i was researching cigarettes

SEIU Warns Dems: If You Don’t Back Reform, We Won’t Back You

Hardball time.

In what seems intended as a shot across the bow of House Dems wavering on health reform, top officials with the labor powerhouse SEIU have bluntly told a Democratic member that they will pull their support for him — and will likely field a challenger against him — if he votes No on the Senate bill.

Dem Rep Mike McMahon of New York met yesterday with a top SEIU official and told him he’s likely to vote No, the official tells me. The official: Mike Fishman, president of SEIU 32bj, the largest property workers union in the country, with 120,000 members in eight states.

Fishman told McMahon that the union would not support him if he voted No — and suggested the hunt for a primary or third-party challenger would follow.

“He let us know he’s not supportive of the health care plan,” Fishman says. “We’ve let him know that we can’t support somebody who doesn’t support it.”

“We are going to begin talking to other unions about finding someone else for that seat,” Fishman continued.

McMahon enjoyed heavy labor backing when he was elected to his conservative Staten Island district in 2008. He voted No on the bill last time but was said to be undecided on the Senate bill, and labor had hoped to win his support for the crucial final vote.

Fishman said SEIU officials were intent on sending a message to other House Dems that they risk losing the union’s support if they don’t vote for the bill — and said the union’s rank and file membership strongly wanted reform to pass.

“We put an enormous amount of effort into electing Democrats,” Fishman said. “This is the most important issue on everyone’s plate. We’re sending a message to Democrats: If you can’t support this, we can’t support you.”

Obviously what labor does along these lines will vary from district district, but this seems like a message that’s going to be delivered more than a few more times in coming days.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/labor/big-union-warns-dems-if-you-dont...

toniD's Ya Think?

Much later!

Have a great evening. At least try!

toniD's Ya Think?

The United States, United Nations, Russia and European Union condemned Israel on Friday for approving 1,600 new homes in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as their future capital.

A statement from the so-called Quartet of Mideast peacemakers reaffirmed that unilateral action by the Israelis or Palestinians cannot prejudge the outcome of (peace) negotiations and will not be recognized by the international community.

"The Quartet condemns Israel's decision to advance planning for new housing units in east Jerusalem," the statement said. "The Quartet has agreed to closely monitor developments in Jerusalem and to keep under consideration additional steps that may be required to address the situation on the ground."
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"The Quartet will take full stock of the situation at its meeting in Moscow on March 19," the statement said.

Israel's announcement this week of more east Jerusalem construction angered visiting U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and the Palestinians. Only days earlier, the Palestinians agreed to begin indirect peace talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, dropping a demand for a full settlement freeze before talks begin.

Netanyahu has agreed only to a limited slowdown that does not include east Jerusalem, which Israel sees as part of its capital.

The Quartet called on all concerned to support the urgent resumption of
dialogue between the parties and to promote an atmosphere that is conducive to successful negotiations to resolve all outstanding issues of the conflict.

The group reiterated that Arab-Israeli peace and the establishment of an
independent, contiguous and viable state of Palestine is in the fundamental interests of the parties, of all states in the region, and of the international community.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156070.html

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sharply rebuked Israel over its recent decision to build new settlements in East Jerusalem.

She told Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu by telephone that the move was "deeply negative" for US-Israeli relations.

The BBC's Washington correspondent, Kim Ghattas, says it was a rare and sharp rebuke from Washington.

Israel's announcement overshadowed a visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden aimed at restarting peace talks.

Since then the Palestinians have indicated they will not return to the negotiating table unless the Israeli decision is revoked.

Apology

America's top diplomat delivered her rebuke during a 43-minute telephone conversation with Mr Netanyahu, the US state department said.

US state department spokesman PJ Crowley said Mrs Clinton called "to make clear that the United States considered the announcement to be a deeply negative signal about Israel's approach to the bilateral relationship and contrary to the spirit of the vice-president's trip".

"The secretary said she could not understand how this happened, particularly in light of the United States's strong commitment to Israel's security," he added.

"She made clear that the Israeli government needed to demonstrate not just through words but through specific actions that they are committed to this relationship and to the peace process."

The Quartet of Middle East peace mediators - the US, Russia, the EU and the UN - also condemned the Israeli housing announcement and said it would review the situation at its ministerial meeting scheduled for 19 March in Moscow.

Mr Netanyahu earlier apologised for the timing of the settlement announcement, which was made as Mr Biden was holding a day of talks in Jerusalem.

He said he had summoned Interior Minister Eli Yishai to reprimand him.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders had agreed to hold indirect, "proximity talks" in a bid to restart the peace process, which has been stalled for more than a year.

But after the announcement, the Palestinian Authority said talks would be "very difficult" if the plans for the homes were not rescinded.

Close to 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

The latest announcement by the Jerusalem municipality approves 1,600 new housing units in the East Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo.
POINTS OF TENSION IN JERUSALEM
# 1 Gilo: 850 homes approved for publication and planning objections in Nov 2009
# 2 Pisgat Zeev: 600 homes approved for publication and planning objections in Jan 2010
# 3 Sheikh Jarrah: Several Palestinian families evicted in past 18 months to make way for Jewish settlers after court ruled in ownership dispute
# 4 Ramat Shlomo: 1,600 homes approved for publication and planning objections in Mar 2010
# 5 Silwan: Demolition orders on 88 Palestinian homes built without difficult-to-get permits - Israel planning controversial renewal project
# 6. West Bank barrier: Making Palestinian movement between West Bank and Jerusalem harder - Israel says it's for security
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8565455.stm

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-whale11-2010mar11,0,500007.story

if he thought that The Healthcare reform bill was a step forward I would follow him. I defer to his wisdom.

Miss Sprint Cup, Monica Palumbo, is very Italian. How American is that!

tastes like soap to me too!

heh! had this wonderful gal make me some mex tex one night and as she handed me my plate, she sez "you'll loooove the fresh chopped cilantro in it too!"

it was like eating pork flavored dial soap but my discretion was laudable.

Thanks for your post about that new Edward Bernays biography. Bernays saved ALL his papers. Amazing. That's the book I gotta read next. The curtain pulled away from the Wizard of Oz.

Can't get these thoughts out of my mind
Submitted by nora on Wed, 03/10/2010 - 1:08am.
o At anytime since the Dems got control of Congress (a two-year period), the Dems could have moved/started the process to fix these major problems that are now the only decent part of the so-called healthcare "reform" packages -- the Drug Plan D donut hole, the Drug Plan D no-price-bargaining clause, the pre-existing condition problem, the rescision problem, the anti-trust exemption for insurance companies, and so on. In essence, the Dems sat on these so that they would be used like extortion to make a horrid pro-profiteering "reform" package appear decent. They did it to camouflage a medical insurance industry BAIL-OUT package with MANDATED premium purchases that will never protect The People from the predation of the Insurance Industry.

o The so-called "reform" package will give the Insurance Industry a BAIL-OUT that will amount to $350 billion$ -- money which the Insurance Industry will be able to use to make sure there is NEVER NEVER NEVER adequate progressive legislators in Congress who en masse will revisit the healthcare issues in order to return to "complete the reform". When people say we can always "come back" to fix what is not right and get single payer later, they are NOT thinking about 'following' that BAIL-OUT money. (That money will be used to confuse voters on what the healthcare issues are (maybe even used to disinform about Medicare and Social Security), confuse voters about progressive causes and candidates. This is not an impossible scenario).)

This so-called reform package -- with all its benefits for the strengthening of the Insurance Industry's predatory/profiteering hold on The People -- is passed at our own peril.

Anyway, that's how I feel about it tonight.
=========================

I WANT the Dems to prove they care. The world is their oyster, but they refuse to rule in our name.

I still feel the same way.

I wonder if Nancy's descision
Submitted by taozen on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 2:26pm.
had anything to do with the car accident that Reid's wife and daughter were in?

» =================================

The same thing crossed my mind.

Reid said a few strong things a few days back, too.

Top Insurance Lobbyist Says
Submitted by toniD on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 2:29pm.
Top Insurance Lobbyist Says Industry Won’t Point Fingers, Then Blames Hospitals For Higher Premiums

During the AHIP’s insurance conference on Tuesday, AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni claimed that health insurers were “very concerned about insurance premiums and the trajectory” of health care spending and promised that the industry remained committed to controlling costs. “We understand that begins also with us. So we are fully committed to cost containment,” Ignagni said.

...

=========================

They must have paid a P.R. firm for this spin!

Community hospitals are closing. The issue is how hospitals can SURVIVE and provide good care, not how they can PROFIT and provide sub-standard care.

The insurance corporations don't have to worry about surviving when the White House greases the slide for them.

Committed to cost-containment?! Then why did they finagle all the phony reform stuff with Obama?

(Update: OMG We're kicking @$$! Keep pouring it on!)

" In less than 3 days Bart Stupak's new primary challenger Connie Saltonstall has outraised Stupak on ActBlue. A whole year of Stupak's ActBlue fundraising has been negated in 3 days! Keep it up and help Connie by throwing an anchor at Bart Stupak."

w00t!

"this machine kills fascists"

Submitted by cent on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 4:24pm.
Your words Crank, not mine...wifey, the Clinical Psychologist, and I, are laughing at you...
-----------
You can't intimidate me, cent. You don't have the chops for it.

Obviously there is no point in quoting from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, nor from the multitude of disagreements within the psychiatric community as to nomenclature and diagnostic analysis.

Nor would there be any point in directing you to the many alterations to the diagnostic parameters that occur every few years, clearly indicating that people like your Wifey and other professionals disagree vehemently on both broader and finer points of behavior and mental disorders.

You can continue to pretend that Wifey knows absolutes and that I am ignorant of the intellectual discord within the mental health industry. Such esoterica cannot possibly be learned by mere readers.

The inclusion of dyssocial behavior as a subheading of sociopathy (which, in large part, is where your "mob" citation is coming from) is absurd in my estimation along with the estimation of lots of people who have plenty of credentials to back up their opinions.

First of all, unless you believe that conformity is the only "normal" behavior, then conscious nonconformity is not necessarily a disorder nor abnormal behavior. Most artists would be surprised to learn that they need medical treatment to free them from the bonds of determined eccentricity.

Second, when a person is reared in a subculture, it is not necessarily dyssocial behavior to remain in that subculture throughout adulthood. It's as normal as any other culturized existence. You can't break a taboo that doesn't exist in your frame of reference. It could be argued that, in some cases, to step away from "mob" life would be dyssocial behavior while remaining in mob life would be conformity. This is a classic duality that can be found in lots of literature that has been written in different places and times.

So, no, I don't include dyssocial behavior as another form of sociopath. Some do, some don't. I'm in the don't camp.

If Wifey uses the term "sociopath" as if it has specific meaning beyond the most spare definition of a common sociopath, then she and I are never going to be on the same page. The overlap across sociopathy, psychopathy, dyssocial personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder makes for endless diagnostic possibilities.

If a diagnosis of sociopath were sufficient for two people with entirely different sets of behavior, then a diagnosis of broken leg is sufficient for two people with entirely different broken bones. Both expressions are meaningless except in the most spare interpretations. I would be surprised if any reputable professional would begin and end a diagnosis with "sociopath." The word must be qualified with many additional words because the core meaning is limited.

Back to the original point from which you desperately hope to misdirect in your lust for righteous vengeance: Anyone who declares that all of the sociopaths in the United States are united in a mini-imperialism effort is full of shit.

If Wifey is prepared to back up nora's statement, I would ask Wifey when she interviewed all of the sociopaths in the United States, how she determined that none of them are unconcerned with "mini-imperialism" and why she isn't spearheading an effort to remove Sociopath from the DSM and replace it with Mini-Imperialist.

It would be much easier to identify a sociopath if we used the only behavior and raison d'etre that they all share in common, right? When you see a checkmark in the "Mini-Imperialist" box, you knows you gots yourself a sociopath, by god. Don't let him get away.

Here is a quote from cent: "...and the burden of finding an organization entirely comprised of pure sociopaths is a little rigid even for one with your anal retentive requirements..."

Can you not see that you have rewritten the objection that I have with nora's claim? Her statement is over-the-top absurd. The header over my objection even said Ab-Fucking-Surd. She stated that all American sociopaths can be found united in a single task. You recognize absurdity when I challenge you with sarcasm but you will not acknowledge absurdity when nora emphatically (with the liberal use of all-caps) carves it all over the blog on a daily or, rather, nightly basis.

One more point for you and Wifey to contemplate. When there is a foul-mouthed dust-up on this blog with a distinct undercurrent of physical threat that is unrelated to the disagreement over the facts, who is in it?

cent and Bait
cent and Fernando
cent and dr
cent and 60th

Are you beginning to see a pattern?

You Are Not Entitled To A Break
Submitted by Crank Bait on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 2:34pm.
....
================================

Crank, why do you insist on doing this on the main thread when you could do it in a focussed exchange? Again I invite you here:

http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5677#comment-399923

Dylan Ratigan & Eliot Spitzer
Explain Lehman Brothers Report 10:51

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBUzzfCw5qs

_ _ _ _
brr

that killed five

A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times.

The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman’s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery”, Nato claimed that the force had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room.

A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown.
...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7060395.e...

The latest episode of:

Dysfunctional Sociopathic Family Theatre

Notice how I spelled theater with "re". Now that's klassy!

Obama signing the committees' changes to the healthcare reform package BEFORE the bill gets back to the Senate? Am I getting that straight? Is that Unitary Executive behavior? If that is challenged in court and makes its way to the Supreme Court, where would that go?

Oh, hello, Joe. Hiya, Mr. Dunnaghy-hee-hee-hee-hee

How long did you spend writing that and why?

You and cent are on the same side. Nobody is "RIGHT". Both of you fuckers are imperfect.

I blame it on your mothers.

bwahahahahahah!

Pull up your zippers

and re-engage in civil discourse. Oneupmanship is so 20th century.

That's what Maggie would say.

Me? I say go out back and duke it out or just STFU.

Don't make me come out of retirement.

I love this place. Contentious and hilarious! thanks! :)

"this machine kills fascists"

to be trampled by the feline feet transporting said fog to your 'hood.

Why do I worry, you've got big shoulders.

FOG

Thanks for the "caustic" funnies, Kewl Sederville Gang ...
;)

Submitted by nora on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 8:47pm.
Crank, why do you insist on doing this on the main thread
-----------
When you stop posting claptrap on the main thread, I'll stop calling it out on the main thread. That's how it works: You write stupid stuff, somebody else disagrees with the stupid stuff. If you want to hold court unmolested, stay on an Open Mic. I don't care what you say in your sequestered hovel. You and your loyal readers can have a raucous discussion about the evils of contrails and fluoride without so much as a throat clearing from me.

The main thread is not a forum for nora to say anything she wants to say without consequence. Either you can defend your sweeping generalities and paranoid fantasies, or you can't.

There is a curious dynamic that exists on this blog: Some of us are held to a very high standard of accuracy. A few of us aren't expected to be anywhere near accurate. The people who have gotten a pass over the years have always been cyber-versions of the bearded guy on the corner carrying a sign, "The end is near!" The rest of us are expected to step off the curb and walk around him while he mumbles his gibberish and shakes his fist at the clouds.

cent will jump all over 60th Street for an inconsequential error. cent will allow you to qwerty incoherently for days on end without interjecting so much as a whimper.

gloryoski will loudly protest a slight (always seen under a male byline) that is invisible to everyone else. She can't muster a dissenting comment when you write about the moonwalk faked in Hollywood.

Leah will argue the minutia of an obscure and detailed subject with me but she's unconcerned with the fiction you natter every day.

It's as if you are the retarded kid that we are not supposed to pick on. I don't see it that way. I don't think you are stupid. I think you are crazy...just like the bearded guy talking to himself on the corner.

Either way, crazy or stupid, you don't own the corner even though you carry the same sign in here every day and spew the same nonsense. I am not a chauvinist who is afraid to challenge a woman (hi there, cent, you condescending protectionist of the weak and frail gender) because my momma made damned sure that I regard women and men with the same intellectual standard.

If you can't take the heat, stay on the Open Mic.

Bakersfield style.

This is to be expected when a boy moves from West Virginia to west Virginia.

I know momma tried zeek, but you just couldn't help yourself. ;-)

Money for Nothing
The Liberal Media
By Eric Alterman
March 11, 2010
On February 23 the New York Times reported that ABC News had decided to reduce its staff by a whopping 300 to 400 people, or approximately a quarter of its workforce. Three days later, the paper ran a full-page ad featuring a Photoshopped crowd of the network's biggest and best-compensated celebrities. It included the stars of Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy alongside newly promoted newscasters Evening News anchor Diane Sawyer and Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos.

Viewed side by side, the advertisement and the news story led to an obvious conclusion: ABC is looting its news division to invest in its stars. CBS did much the same when it enticed Katie Couric away from NBC with a promise of a reported $15 million annual payday plus promotional advertising worth at least another $10 million. Sawyer's and Stephanopoulos's new compensation packages are not public, but in 2006 Sawyer was already reportedly making $12 million a year in the job Stephanopoulos now has. When Peter Jennings died five years ago, he left an estate valued at $54 million. (Morning show hosts are paid like anchors because, while less prominent in the media, their shows rake in the big bucks from advertisers.) And yet despite the implications of ABC's advertising campaign, it is the network's news rather than its entertainment division that must carry the weight of these salaries. Can it be mere coincidence that the network cannot afford actual journalists anymore?

The news business is everywhere in crisis. CBS's news division is losing around 6 percent of its staff, and NBC has also made significant cuts, despite its being buoyed by the ability to amortize its costs across MSNBC, CNBC and MSNBC.com. Ironically, given the timing, ABC News president David Westin recently received the Radio-Television Digital News Foundation's First Amendment Leadership Award. Referring to the "wave after wave" of network cuts, he warned fellow broadcasters, "I can see no greater challenge to the First Amendment than the threats that are being faced by so many of our news organizations...threats to their ability to have the wherewithal to employ reporters and support them with the resources that they need."

Well, I have an idea. Imagine a world in which evening anchors, morning hosts (and even network news division presidents) were paid like journalists instead of hedge-fund managers. How many "resources" would that free up to invest in genuine news-gathering operations? Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the Times and The New Yorker manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do. So, too, do the folks at PBS and NPR. Would any sane person argue that the work of Bill Moyers or Terry Gross is somehow inferior to that of their network counterparts? (Here at The Nation, well, let's just say salaries are more in line with real cops than the actors who play them on Law & Order.)

Westin is worrying about the threats to the First Amendment of laying off a quarter of his staff, but whose idea was it for the networks to gut the news division of journalists to pay movie-star salaries to celebrity hosts in the first place? (Though, to be fair to movie stars, George Clooney reportedly did his brilliant performance in Up in the Air for just $2 million, less than a seventh of his usual fee.)

I teach a class at Brooklyn College on the portrayal of journalists in film since the days of The Front Page, and I found one could track the evolution of this attitude toward star compensation through two relatively recent films. In The Paper (1994), directed by Ron Howard, a crusty old veteran editor played by Robert Duvall tells the ambitious, obnoxious Glenn Close, who wants a raise to pay her decorator, the following fable about what it used to mean to be in the news business. (I found it transcribed on David Warsh's Economic Principals blog.) Duvall explains:

In '68, a bunch of us that were covering the Olympics in Grenoble decided to go to the best restaurant in town. Now, the menu didn't have any prices, but we were on expense accounts and we figured, screw it, got drunk. There ended up, I don't know, being fifteen or twenty of us at the table. And when the check came, woo, it was $9,000! So there we are, all starting to point fingers, we're trying to remember who invited who, we're talking about going down to Western Union to get money cabled. And just when it was starting to get really embarrassing, this funny little guy at the next table called the maitre d' over, drew a couple of squiggly lines on a napkin, signed his name to it, winked at us, and that was that. The old guy was Pablo Picasso. And that napkin paid our bill. The people we cover, we move in their world, but it is their world. You can't keep up. If you try to make this job about the money, you'll just make yourself miserable. Because we don't get the money. Never have, never will.

That was then. Now cut to James Brooks's Broadcast News (1987), where much of the staff of the network's Washington bureau are being forced to clean out their desks and rewrite their résumés in what we now know was just the first wave of apparently endless personnel cuts. The overpaid anchor, wonderfully underplayed by Jack Nicholson, is evincing crocodile tears over the human cost of heartless corporate bean-counting: "You can make it less brutal by knocking a million off your salary," avers a brave colleague. Nicholson gives him a look of death.

Today, the producer would have to say at least "10 million" to make the story credible, but I'm afraid the look on Jack's face would be much the same.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/alterman

man, what spin
that's as evasive as hell
nora simply requested that you move greivance with her onto an open mic
so that others don't have to witness your putrid slander of her
because that's the issue...
your pathological hatred of nora
and guess what, fuck face
her fans here are in the majority

and by the way, you wrote...
//cent will jump all over 60th Street for an inconsequential error//
um, isn't this what i called you out for...
an inconsequential error
that double standard is worthy of any republican

and do you want to know my definition of a sociopath
it's not relegated to a lone serial killer or a bloodless academic definition...
it's a sadistic human parasite
so the "mob" qualifies

i'd go on, but you're a disingenuous arsehole
so it's a waste of time

The Democrats' scam becomes more transparent
By Glenn Greenwald
Friday, Mar 12, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats: all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster: sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted. Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents. In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

read on...
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/12/democrats/i...

"the system is working"

if you really want to read the tea leaves
to know which way the votes will fall
just click this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations

and scroll down to
6.1 Board of directors
6.2 Corporate Members
6.3 Notable current council members
6.4 Notable historical members
6.5 List of Chairmen
6.6 List of Presidents
6.7 Notable historical members

that's all you need to know

Activists picket health insurance executives Updated at 1:05 AM

Source: CNN

Washington (CNN) - Activists ratcheted up the pressure for health care reform Tuesday, picketing in front of a hotel where a group of insurance industry leaders were meeting.

More than 1,000 protesters, including representatives of organized labor, marched through downtown Washington before stopping in front of the Ritz Carlton, site of the annual conference of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), an insurance industry lobbying group.

"We're fired up (and) can't take no more," the marchers chanted as they unfurled an oversized roll of yellow police tape emblazoned with the words "corporate crime scene."

They were led by, among others, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a prominent backer of reform legislation.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/09/activists-picket-health-...

toniD's Ya Think?

this dem stockholm syndrome shit has been going on for
not 1 decade (bush)
not 3 decades (reagan)
well, here's a hint *toot-toot*... gee schucks, tom

Steamboats Are Ruining Everything takes us back to 1820 and reminds us that brutish conservatives are nothing new: William Hazlitt explained the nature of it in his 1820 essay...

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-spirit-of-partisanship.html

Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks.

thomas-jefferson-big copy The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

– The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

– The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”

As the nation’s second-largest textbook market, Texas has enormous leverage over publishers, who often “craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers.” Indeed, as The Washington Monthly has reported, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”

-DJ Carella

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/12/texas-education-board-cuts-thomas-je...

Update Following repeated failed attempts to add figures in Hispanic history to the textbooks, one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, stormed "out of the meeting late Thursday night, saying, 'They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

toniD's Ya Think?

toniD's Ya Think?

combine this
Newstainment
Submitted by CeeCee on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 11:52pm. with this
Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks.
and you get...
god is on the tv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syrrhcq3aMw

"anything to belong"

nice one, mr. fish
oh, that mr. fish
is such a bastard at nailing it down

FEAR FACTOR.... The American Medical Association wants congressional Democrats to vote for health care reform. So does the American Nurses Association. The American Cancer Society does, too, along with AARP, the NAACP, and progressive activist groups like MoveOn.org.

What do all of these groups have in common, aside from being right about health care policy? Congressional Dems who will decide whether reform lives or dies aren't especially afraid of any of them.

Labor unions, however, are another matter entirely.

Dem Rep Mike McMahon of New York met yesterday with a top SEIU official and told him he's likely to vote No, the official tells me. The official: Fishman, president of SEIU 32bj, the largest property workers union in the country, with 120,000 members in eight states.

Fishman told McMahon that the union would not support him if he voted No -- and suggested the hunt for a primary or third-party challenger would follow.

"He let us know he's not supportive of the health care plan," Fishman says. "We've let him know that we can't support somebody who doesn't support it.... "We are going to begin talking to other unions about finding someone else for that seat."

The message for incumbent Democrats from labor isn't subtle: "If you can't support this, we can't support you."

In McMahon's case, the New York Democrat already voted against health care reform when it came up in November, but Dems saw him as a possible switcher. With labor applying this kind of pressure to Democrats who already opposed reform once, it seems likely the pressure will be even more intense to keep reform's supporters on board with the proposal.

It a lot of districts, unions help provide campaign infrastructure for Democratic candidates -- helping with get-out-the-vote drives, working phone banks, distributing campaign materials -- and for Dems who are worried about generating support for their re-election campaigns, these threats will be hard to ignore.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_03/022837.php

toniD's Ya Think?

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/radical-freak.html
it's where i scored the greenwald article
from one of the comments by sarah b.

Could nora Be Playing To The Crowd? Naaw.
new
Submitted by Crank Bait on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 10:44pm.
Submitted by nora on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 8:47pm.
Crank, why do you insist on doing this on the main thread

...
------------------

How does a person "play to the crowd" in Open Mic if the crowd is at the main thread enjoying themselves?

COULD IT BE YOU, Crank, who wishes to "play to the crowd" by TAKING OVER the main thread?

Crank, are you so unfeeling, unhearing, insensitive that you don't realize that many here are TIRED/ANNOYED with having this great main thread resource turned into your private Crankbait Blog? Start an Open Mic of your OWN; it might actually make you feel more effective; you can repeat your oft repeated curses of me on YOUR OWN TIME. And I'll take you on as much as suits me. But spare the community at large. For the last few time you've made your initial attacks, I've taken them to Open Mic to respond, and if others want to follow the discussion they can, they have a choice. But when you INSIST like this that the main thread is YOURS for any PROTRACTED floggings YOU desire, I gotta wonder WHAT would satisfy you.

In the meantime, I'll continue to make my responses to your now predictable attacks in Open Mic, like this one:
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5677#comment-400082

crank doesn't get the irony of...
Could nora Be Playing To The Crowd?

and, nora
the main thrust of his argument is that he's...
//TIRED/ANNOYED with having this great main thread resource turned into your private nora Blog//

now, maybe, and this is only a suggestion
if you were to post some of your more, how can i say it, your more fringier posts to an open mic; you know, um, that killing flies is a sin & landing on the moon was bogus, etc
but notify us of them here, of course...
then, maybe, this may lessen the venom circulating in cranks head!
i'm not saying to kowtow to the bastards demands
although, a good case could be made that i am
and nor do i wish you to self-censure yourself
no, what i'm saying is, um... *gosh*
oh, fuck it

"nothing is true, everything is permissible"

conflict resolution isn't not really my forte...
that why i prefer wearing clown shoes
which i do with a certain amount of flair

: )

My initial reaction to cilantro was that some terrible mistake had been made because this could not possibly be considered edible by anyone with functioning tastebuds.
And it smelled bad. I dunno what happened, but I came to love it. Reminds me of this place, somewhat.

Two of the fun-est words in the English language!

YES! :D

Air-ono, I think Clown Shoes Conflict Resolution would be a good business to start in a recession -- flair and the courage united in a single service!

Clown Shoes Conflict Resolution
everyone has to wear clown shows to the negotiating table
like they did in the old days
when dan was king

The thing they say about men with big feet...
Um, well, they don't say that about men in oversized shoes...
But you knew that.

I do like the squeaky red nose!

when there's no more cilantro
do you start munching on the soap

"hey, it's just like cilantro... only frothy"

UN Humanitarian "chief" indicates that Israel's continued blockade of GAZA neither helps security nor undoes Hamas' role in the area. Also, without the smuggled goods coming in, Gaza would not be able to survive.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/03/11/un_humanitarian_ch...

It had a unique flavor that I thought was purely awful at first. I only tried it repeatedly because people I loved and trusted served it to me in dishes full of other ingredients I liked.

What can I say? I used to love sugary things, now they repel me. I used to hate unusual, strong flavors and now they are the things I like most. So it goes.

you win
but wear do the clown shoes fit in
would the act be funnier if i stepped on a bar of cilantro
is that what you're saying

: )

thank you
it's been a pleasure
you've exhausted me here and over at alice's open mic
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5709
so i must take my leave

goodnight
xox

others that cannot bare the taste of cilantro. Everywhere from South to North, I hear what a great taste it has; wheras, I think it ruins the "taste".
;) Well, Time to Brew

G'night. Rest well.
Thanks much for Wake In Fright.
Like we used to say in the 60s:
Blew my mind, man.

Sincerely, that was amazing and cathartic.
I have to see if I can have some kind of legitimate access to it. You are a person I value. Don't stop commenting here, please.

Later. :)

Ms A, I think you might be in the majority when it comes to cilantro. Most folks I know hate cilantro. It does seem an acquired taste. Not a problem, I think. We all can eat what we want, and not eat what we think tastes icky, eh?

of which they speak ? ;)

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

I think cilantro tastes soapy too. However, I let my cilantro plant go to seed, and boy, I love the seeds which are called coriander.

http://www.chow.com/ingredients/282

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/decoding-the-language-of-social-contro...

Decoding the Language of Social Control by Manuel Garcia Jr.

[excerpt]

When Ronald Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was saying that we, the people, were the problem since our government is the democratic abstraction of our shared existence. So if we are “the problem,” then whose problem is this? Why would “our” President disown the apparatus of our common will, whose implementation he had been entrusted to lead? Certainly, one could understand “our” President saying that there were problems in the government apparatus limiting its responsiveness to our needs, and effectiveness in achieving our goals: “my purpose as your President is solving the problems our government has in meeting all its obligations to the public.” Note however, this last quote is fictional.

On the 20th of January, 1981, the new President of the United States was telling us that “we the people” were in somebody’s way, a somebody who actually was represented by the power and authority he now held, and which he intended to use to destroy the deposed government that was “us.” A coup. In the light of subsequent history, a reasonable characterization. Twenty-nine years and one day after Ronald Reagan came to power, the U.S. Supreme Court made it plain, by issuing its Dred Scott decision of the 21st century, elevating corporate rights above those of individual flesh-and-blood human beings. Now, every legally recognized person — real or corporate — is equally entitled to spend as much as they have to influence political debate. Clearly, because political access is so precious, it must be metered out on the basis of wealth.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” (Anatole France: Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault 1844-1924)

“It is true that liberty is precious, so precious that it must be rationed.” (Attributed to Lenin: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870-1924)

Yes, we, the people, are certainly in somebody’s way, unless our consumption, labor or demise lards a corporate bottom line. Think of yourself as a unit in a statistical ensemble of metabolic form virtual property, an advanced concept of slavery that transcends the 13th Amendment and the unitary static materialist concept of the lump-of-flesh slave; a human herd whose collective activity in a spectrum of markets exudes profitability like the methane clouds that flatulate up from bovine concentrations. The free market system strikes a match to the gas, charges you for the heat and leaves you with the ashes, if not a scorched rump. We are herded by the owners of the markets we are counted in.

One example is health care; our medical needs are not the prime concern, but instead preserving the profits of the parasitic medical financing business carried on by the insurance industry, which is interposed between medical providers and patients. So our medical market owners, the insurance industry, must herd us to its best advantage, not ours. When we, the people, try to fashion a public health care system that does meet our needs, by cutting out the middleman (the essence of good business practice), we immediately find that “government is the problem.” In fact, democracy is the problem. If democracy is not strictly rationed, the whole herd might stampede and any number of markets tossed over and sunk, like the bales of tea dropped into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773.

[end excerpt]

The piece says the US media avoided reporting this finding. Maybe someone might ask, did any US monies fund this atrocity....

http://www.dofollownet.com/World/Colombia_Paramilitaries_Confess_30_000_...

[excerpt]

February 25, 2010 - Colombia is horrified after the Department of Justice published official statistics based on paramilitaries confessions: at least 30,000 people murdered and more than 2500 people "missing" (and probably dead).

Denied for years, the reality of the massacres perpetrated since the 80s by the right-wing paramilitary, mainly on civilians (peasants, indigenous people, students and workers) started to surface in 2003, after President Alvaro Uribe negociated a peace deal with the United Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), promising a maximum sentence of 8 years to any paramilitary member who disarmed and gave full testimonies.

These numbers are just the confessed crimes, and real number of victims could be much higher, as mass graves are discovered regularly across the country. Luis Gonzalez Leon, head of the Justice and Peace Unit, who receives the confessions, thinks that the total number of paramilitary murders could reach 120,000.

When Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped in 2002 by the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), all the mainstream media worldwide focused on her case and depicted the FARC as monsters and terrorists, while the right-wing paramilitary groups were expelling thousands of Indians in the Sierra Nevada and burning some of their victims in furnaces.

Why were these death squads allowed to act with impunity?

The paramilitary groups emerged in the late 60s from self-defense groups and milicias armed by drug lords or local politicians. At first associated with the drug cartels, they eventually took the total control of the cocaine market, becoming an economic power with a strong hold on politic: presently, one-third of the representants elected in 2002 are under investigation for alleged ties to death squads. Most of them were supporters of now president Alvaro Uribe, including former senator Mario Uribe, his own cousin.

No wonder that Supreme Court judges investigating these cases have been tapped by the Colombian secret services and have even been accused of "bribing a paramilitary leader to implicate President Uribe in a murder scandal..

In the mean time, new death squads are forming in Medellin, Cali and caribbean coast of Colombia to replace the dissolved paramilitary groups, and the killing of opponents seems still in fashion.

Read also on Axis of Logic :

Corporate media silent on Colombian paramilitaries' confession to 30,000 murders

This article by Les Blough explains why the corporate media doesn't consider this report to be newsworthy and explores the connection between President Uribe, the drug cartels and the paramilitary.

...

[end excerpt]

==========

AND--Death squads renew attacks on indigenous peoples

http://www.dofollownet.com/World/Indigenous_Peoples_struggle_to_survive_...

[excerpt]

February 23, 2010 - Amnesty International today denounced an increase in attacks against Indigenous Peoples across Colombia during 2009, which is leaving many communities struggling for survival.

The organization blamed guerrilla groups, the security forces and paramilitaries for the abuses – which include killings, enforced disappearances and kidnappings, threats, sexual abuse of women, recruitment of child soldiers, forced displacement and persecution of Indigenous leaders.

“Indigenous Peoples are increasingly under attack in Colombia,” said Marcelo Pollack, Colombia Researcher at Amnesty International. “They are being killed and threatened, forced to participate in the armed conflict, and being kicked out of their lands.”

“It is time for the Colombian government to take its obligations seriously and take immediate action to protect Indigenous Peoples.”

According to figures from the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, at least 114 Indigenous women, men and children were killed and thousands forcibly displaced in 2009 alone.

Amnesty International also said crimes committed against Indigenous Peoples are rarely investigated by the authorities.

Thousands of Indigenous Peoples have been forced off their land because they often live in areas of intense military conflict and rich in biodiversity, minerals and oil. Many other Indigenous communities have been unable to leave their territories because armed groups have laid landmines in surrounding areas.

Access to food and essential medicines has also been blocked by the warring parties, who often argue such goods are destined for the enemy. All parties to the conflict have occupied schools and used them as military bases, while teachers continue to be vulnerable to physical attack, denying Indigenous communities access to education.

“Unless the authorities take speedy action to protect Indigenous Peoples in Colombia there is a real risk that many will disappear,” said Marcelo Pollack.
...

[end excerpt]

Report on the EU's emissions trading scheme by the UK group sandbag.org.

Anybody know anything about this group?

http://sandbag.org.uk/files/sandbag.org.uk/carbon_fat_cats_march2010.pdf

{excerpt]

...with most power companies buying EUA permits to comply with the ETS and passing the cost of compliance to EU power consumers; it is likely that EU citizens are unwittingly paying what amounts to a subsidy to industry without any cuts to CO2 emissions taking place.

[end excerpt]

I never thought of it quite that way before, at least to put into words.

So, see Alice, you were so right in what you said about the pedagogy of the assholes.

(P.S. I know many lovely atheists. Not a knock on all of them at all.)

Who doesn't like cilantro?

Good grief; it's my favorite spice.

community? (In the Morrisonian sense? You be the judge.)

Oh yeah, Scahill's alive, in case anyone else was wondering.

"just for laughs," in your little pointy-headed house and then thinking you know it all.

Quite enlightening.

No one thing is all I need to know. But you knew that.

:)

I do not know that source, but if it's a good one, thank you in advance for the source as well.

a BLAST from the (wfi...wfi...) past.

Jayne Cortez and Firespitters-There It Is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6bKgljhvR0

Disclaimer on the penis polishing.

(And, they really DON'T care if you're an "individualist," you know.)

Glenn Beck Denounces "Born In The USA" as Anti-American

Twenty-six years after the release of Bruce Springsteen's hit song, "Born in The USA," conservative talk show host/performance artist Glenn Beck finally got around to listening to the lyrics.

Beck was shocked, shocked to discover that for all these years he'd been rocking out to a song about a bitter down-and-out Vietnam vet who has been kicked to the curb by the aforementioned USA.

Is Beck aware that conservative demigod Ronald Reagan used "Born in the USA" as a theme song for his reelection campaign? The cognitive dissonance is going to smart. Beck loves Reagan. "Because of Ronald Reagan, my grandfather, my father, I have hope for America," Beck told an audience at the conservative CPAC conference earlier this year.

Yesiree, The Gipper loved The Boss. Reagan thought Springsteen was a shining example of hope. According to Roadside America:

On the afternoon on September 19, 1984, President Ronald Reagan spoke before an enthusiastic crowd in downtown Hammonton, New Jersey. The speech was mostly political boilerplate, but it did contain one memorable passage. "America's future," Reagan said, "rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey's Bruce Springsteen."

People even vaguely familiar with the songs of Bruce Springsteen know that they rarely contain messages of hope for America's future. But Reagan was oblivious.

Beck correctly senses that Springsteen didn't reciprocate Reagan's admiration. The campaign didn't get Springsteen's permission to use "Born in the USA" as a theme song. When the artist found out, he put a stop to it.

In the same video clip, Beck urges his viewers to wake up and realize that Woody Guthrie's beloved anthem "This Land is Your Land" is unpatriotic, despite the fact that we all sang it at summer camp, and the lyrics make perfect sense (even to Beck). I am not making this up.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/19039

Paul Krugman....

Beck in the U.S.A.

Too funny — Glenn Beck finally listened to Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics and discovered that they’re anti-American — I mean, talking about a Vietnam vet who can’t find work is obviously unpatriotic, because, uh, anyone who really wants to work can find a job.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/beck-in-the-u-s-a/

toniD's Ya Think?

i think my favorite spice would be garlic followed by cumin.

something i like that most don't is capers. i think its the intensity of the flavor.

i did not know that corriander was dried cilantro seeds.

matt damons new movie which puts to film the belief that the whole iraq war was based on lies and deception is getting a lot of bad reviews.

do you suppose its because the movie sucks or is it just a political hatchet job?

Campaign stunt launches a corporate 'candidate' for Congress

Source: The Washington Post

By John Wagner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 13, 2010

Murray Hill might be the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation's capital. And if these are cynical times, well, then, it's safe to say Murray Hill is by far the most cynical.

That's because this little upstart is, in fact, a start-up. Murray Hill is actually Murray Hill Inc., a small, five-year-old Silver Spring public relations company that is seeking office to prove a point (and perhaps get a little attention).

After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR201003...

toniD's Ya Think?

I watched this last night on Anderson Cooper's show. It reminded me of my problem with vioxx and my losing suit against Merck. But this is a really big problem now with Huge Pharma Cos and is endangering almost everyone.

March 12, 2010 CNN

(Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc. agreed to a $1.2 billion criminal fine, the largest in U.S. history, and a felony plea by a subsidiary to close an investigation into what government lawyers described as fraudulent marketing of drugs.

The fine, over sales practices for a painkiller since pulled from the market, makes up the biggest single share of a record $2.3 billion settlement, announced today, between the U.S. Justice Department and New York-based Pfizer. The deal includes $1 billion in civil penalties, the largest non-criminal fraud case against a drugmaker, the department said.

Pfizer, the world’s largest drugmaker, entered into a five- year integrity agreement with the Health and Human Services Department as well. The government pays for medicines through several health programs and joined the investigation after private whistleblowers filed lawsuits in three states. The criminal case revolved around allegations that the painkiller Bextra and three other medicines were promoted for uses other than those approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a4h7V5lc_xXM

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/09/pfizer_whistleblower_tells_his.h...

http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10004218/pfizer-rep-claims-bextra-pushed...

Also another reason that there should be no advertising for these new drugs and that the FDA must be made stronger with more regulations.

This is actually frightening!

toniD's Ya Think?

Something's Come Along And It's Burst Our Bubble! [Yeah Yeah!]
Uh-Oh!, We're In Trouble, Book Us A Ticket On The Next Space Shuttle!

following on from CeeCee's Newstainment post @ 11:52pm

Did you know that when the White House and members of the media mention "code words like 'diversity' and 'equality'" what they are really proposing is "communist revolution?"

Did you know that Osama bin Laden's remarks about global warming are almost identical to "those of the average, run-of-the-mill leftist, like Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or the entire Democrat Party?" Or that the "global warming scam" is "an effort by the left to destroy capitalist economies?"

Here's one I'll bet you didn't know: President Barack Obama was "advised by [the] Ft. Hood Shooter."

If you didn't know the "facts" above, it means you probably haven't been spending your time listening to talk radio hosts such as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, and G. Gordon Liddy. It's hard work listening to these shows, but progressives should be paying attention to the impact they're having: 48 million people get their news from these guys, according to the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, and the numbers of radio stations that carry at least some talk shows grew to 2,056 from 1,370 the year before, according to Inside Radio magazine.

That's...
1. more than twice the collective audience for the three TV network evening news shows combined
2. more than 5 times the audience of the 3 network Sunday news shows
3. nearly 7 times the combined audience for cable news shows
4. nearly 10 times the audience for NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered,"
5. and 16 times the audience for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Read on ...
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/03/ta031110.html

I was at an event last night with veteran broadcaster Joan Hamburg and she talked about this as well. Some of her stories were enough to chill your blood.

There is a huge audience for this crap and they are engaged, active and freaked out. And their toxic ideas seep out even beyond their numbers in large and small ways, infecting the entire body politic.

I recently watched Hotel Rwanda again. And I got the uneasiest feeling.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/it-matters.html

And When We Get In
We're Gonna Get Killed
Uh-Oh!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8rgO7-USKU

why do you write "source"
the source is in the link...
like, derr

i don't know if it annoys anyone else, but it fucking annoys me

Often times it is embedded in the piece being copied and B. sometimes the link looks nothing like the source.

Think about it. ;-)

It's part of what I cut and paste and sometines I get too lazy to take it out which would mean I'd have to copy and paste twice to remove it or I'd have to delete it before posting.

Will I change the way I post because it bothers you? No!

toniD's Ya Think?

Unemployment rate for young veterans hits 21.1 percent

Source: Washington Post

Unemployment rate for young veterans hits 21.1 percent
Saturday, March 13, 2010

Jobless rate at 21.1% for ages 18 to 24

The unemployment rate last year for young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars hit 21.1 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, reflecting a tough obstacle that combat veterans face as they make the transition home from war.

The number was well above the 16.6 percent jobless rate for non-veterans of the same ages, 18 to 24. It was significantly higher than the 2008 unemployment rate among veterans in that age group: 14.1 percent.

Many of the unemployed are members of the National Guard and reserves who have deployed multiple times, said Joseph Sharpe, director of the economic division at the American Legion. Sharpe said some come home to find their jobs have been eliminated because the company has downsized. Other companies might not want to hire someone who could deploy again or will have medical appointments because of war-related health problems, he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR201003...

Sorry Ono, couldn't resist! :)

toniD's Ya Think?

the movie has been released
but you'll have to go to brazil to buy it
when you hop out of the canoe or whatever mode of transport you took
ask one of the locals where yo can locate a big river
and it'll take you to...

http://www.amazon.com/Wake-Fright-Filmed-Outback-Film/dp/185375482X

: )

and mmr
i don't know what cilantro is either
(sounds too gourmet & liberal for me)
but if i did want to know, i remind myself that
google is my friend

according to nora, cilantro is the coriander seed plant
and i thought coriander was a plant

Thinking of you...

Bybee Memo, page 11 ff. Just slightly past the hundred-word definition of "other."

http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/doj/bybee80102mem.pdf

1st, to maggiesboy
1. i've never ever seen it embedded
2. if the source isn't clear from the link, then include it if it's so earth shatteringly important

2nd, to toni
obviously it bothers me
but, um, it's up to you if you want to change
i don't want to be a bossy boots
if it turns you on
so be it

'The Public Option Act'
This is a good idea:

Congressman Alan Grayson, (D-Orlando), today introduced a bill (H.R. 4789) which would give the option to buy into Medicare to every citizen of the United States. The “Public Option Act,” also known as the “Medicare You Can Buy Into Act,” would open up the Medicare network to anyone who can pay for it. ...

The bill would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish enrollment periods, coverage guidelines, and premiums for the program. Because premiums would be equal to cost, the program would pay for itself.

“The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote,” Congressman Grayson said.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/the_public_option_ac...

Comprehensive visions for reform and incremental visions for reform have been at odds throughout this process. That was proper, in many ways: When you're building a new structure where the different parts work together, you have to be relatively comprehensive about it. But once that structure is constructed, incrementalism makes a lot of sense. Want a public option? Write the bill. Want to outlaw fee-for-service in the exchanges, or give a tax break to insurers who are constructing networks where the doctors have a different payment structure? Offer it in committee. Think subsidies should be higher, or maybe lower? Amendments are a wonderful thing.

A lot of these reforms become easier to implement when there's a place to put them, and incentives you can offer to encourage their adoption. The exchanges are a big step forward in that regard. The public option is a good example. If we passed a public option now, how would you get it, exactly? Call the government? And how would you handle the adverse selection problem, where sicker people who were rejected by private insurers would use the government's offering as a last resort?

There are a lot of other good ideas that wouldn't work very well in the current system, but work a lot better when you've got a simple marketplace where a lot of different insurers are competing with transparent prices, standard descriptions, and some basic rules of the road. You need a comprehensive bill to set that up, but it can play host to a lot of incremental legislation going forward.

Another source:

http://westorlandonews.com/2010/03/09/grayson-introduces-public-option-a...

toniD's Ya Think?

Awwwww...

Not even if I beg and plead with you

Really

really

"nicely?"

:)

when you had it in your open mic before.

'Course I skipped right to the "How Monica saved Soc Sec" chapter.

I'm incorrigible.

is loading like a motherfucker

(see toni - maybe the mf-word will offend some folk - should i curb my use of it for the sake of their aversion to it - i suppose i could have written "slowly" in it's place - but this place, to me, is for mature audiences - a freewheeling speakeasy... to a certain extent, of course)

i'm busy

: )

Cuz it's gonna be rainin' outdoors?

It was only the next logical step on the cilantro/corriander controversy.

addendum: rats, I see dan from "Crazy In Cincinnati" beat me to it.

chris hayes called it democrats' political malfeasance; that's the best characterization of it i have heard so far, it's so accurate it's scary; dems have been engaging in political malfeasance sincve they have been in the majority

'Course I skipped right to the "How Monica saved Soc Sec" chapter.
=====
Stranger things have happened, I guess. What will save Social Security this time around, as I have been seeing articles on how the Dems are ghearing up for anpther go at privatizing.

really, mire
since they have been in the majority, mire
well maybe you might want to update your data bank, mire
let me take you on a journey
along the mississippi river
have you heard of this river, mire

[cue dramatic chipmonk music & click link]

http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5708#comment-400075

Listen Online
Windows Media (128K)
MP3 (128k) :: MP3 (32k) :: AAC+ (48k)
_ _ _
brr

That's what I meant.

Lots of things here irk me but I don't say much about it. There have been times but things don't change so the blog goes on.

CNN is covering the Coffee Party. Seems today is the kick off day. Trying to get people together, other than the internet social sites like Facebook. We'll see what happens.

There was a lady interviewed who says she's from the Coffee Party that said the party agrees with some of the Tea Party's issues, like they are against Big Government. Hmm!
The interviewer didn't press so I'd like to hear exactly how she meant this. Not sold on this yet.

toniD's Ya Think?

and mmr
i don't know what cilantro is either

*******

I'm about 15 miles from the border,ya know.. :)

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

why didn't i know that coriander seeds turn into cilantro? and yes the definition of cilantro's taste soaplike, i think it's appropriate - and no, i don't like cilantro, but i do like coriander, for whatever it's worth

and ono's wake in fright, i agree with cat chew, very intriguing - looked for it everywhere i could but could not find a full version of it on the internet, legit or illegit; and very much doubt that it might be available at blockbuster

Daylight Saving Time may
throw off internal clocks
On Sunday, thanks to daylight saving time, we are all due to lose precious time as we set our clocks forward an hour. Of course this is annoying on a number of levels -- who wants a shorter weekend? -- but there is also emerging scientific evidence that the change disrupts our natural rhythms.

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/daylight-saving-time-may-throw-off...

toniD's Ya Think?

big time with that flash block function. it solved by problem

thank you.

When Bernie Sanders gives up on HCR I will follow,right now I defer to his inside knowledge and I am sure of his intentions.

Mace and nutmeg thats the new spice frontier. which tastes better/ are they really different

you can't find it anywhere, mire
maybe, mire, you may want to update your data bank
by clicking on the link provided here

http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5708#comment-400131

where you'll find another link that will take you deep into the heart of the amazon

lemme tell you something 'bout this guy...
this guy is a great fucking actor

but i don't think he was acting towards the end

Welcome to Woop Woop..

Pretty funny..

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

in mid-2009 a thoroughly restored, digital re-release of Wake in Fright was shown in Australian theatres to considerable acclaim. Later that same year, it was issued commercially on DVD and Blu-ray disc, reaffirming its status as a classic of the Australian cinema.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_in_Fright

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

Checked the CP's website. Couldn't find one party in all of Ohio. That's gotta be wrong.

As for Coffee Party = Tea Party w/ regard to big government, that just goes to show how hard it is to get folks to coalesce around a movement. Maybe that person believed it to be true which would indicate a person suffering some degree of low information or maybe worse it's a tea party infiltrator sent in to muck up the works.

Broken record I am, I see it as small step towards realizing the real problem which is pulling congress's lips off the corporate teat which expresses money in lieu of milk.

Crank, we were not the ones spewing absolutes...you were...just re-read your remarks....once again...

"Apparently you are unaware that sociopaths do not cooperate with social groups in a common cause.That's why they are called sociopaths."

"The idea of a subculture of cooperating sociopaths is as absurd as a wolf pack comprised of alpha individuals."

you make "absurd" definitive declarative statements like this all the time, and they are often wrong, at least in the definitive sense, but you do not hesitate to use them to declare others insane, or full of shit...it is called buffaloing people crank...trying to intimidate people with bullshit and chutzpa, and even though it might work on some, I will call you on it and make you look stupid every time...nora doesn't insult people the way you do, so stop crying "you never say anything to her"...it is boring...

The mere fact you say that the "diagnosis" are in dispute refutes your statement....you are once again redefining the argument, only NOW you are qualifying your remarks by saying you are not in a certain "camp"...your failure to consider the sub-types and even casually acknowledge that others would consider your point in dispute was disingenuous...and you know it, the rest of this charade you are spinning is just tap dancing and back peddling to save face.

...and you STILL do not know what you are talking about, but you do it with such confidence...unfortunately volume does not make up for accuracy...You claim to have a depth of knowledge on this subject but you insist on incorrectly using the terms diagnosis and Sociopath in the same sentence...show me the DSM4r criteria for that, Crank, what is the diagnostic code?..if you've read as much as you claim to you would know it isn't a diagnosis and hasn't been for a very long time...

The term sociopathy, specifically, is only a descriptive classification to define characteristics of conscience (or lack there of) of an individual with regard to behavior and social norms, and even that informal classification is subject to consideration of local and sub-cultural norms...so your non-conformity argument is bogus...more smoke and non sense...and declaring Mob behavior as not antisocial/ dissocial and subject to invalidation by YOUR personal criteria, is very convenient crank, but it does not allow for all involved that might fit criteria for other sub-types of sociopathy and does not pass the DSM4 sniff test of categorizing behavior and personality traits of individuals in general society...you and your "camp" may give someone a pass for anti-social behavior based on sub-cultural norms, but the DSM or ICD do not provide diagnostic criteria for groups, only individuals, as having anti-social/dissocial personalities...and even if I were to accept your viewpoint on dyssocial (mob type) sociopaths (which I don't) as "not really sociopaths" because of sub-cultural mitigating factors, still you seem to reject the reality that aggressive sub-type sociopaths are capable of maintaining and excelling in socializing to a common goal...they are even more ruthless and better at it than the dyssocials, and are more apt to end up in positions of real power, which was noras point...so you are still wrong...

...forgive me if I am not impressed with your Google Scholarship, but it seems 2 dimensional and lacks authenticity of real experience....which was another of my points.

but, back to MY original argument...anyone who declares, AS YOU DID, that ALL sociopaths BY DEFINITION are incapable of cooperation and socialization to achieve a goal does not know what they are talking about...

...and, once again, as I said, I don't necessarily agree with nora, just disagree with you...but, since you keep bringing it up, NO, I did not take her statement to read that all of anything was anything, crank, and personally I think you are pulling that out of your ass to justify your latest abusive hateful episode...your fractionation of sociopathy was most certainly not in your original argument and I find it hard to give you the benefit of the doubt that anything in your current argument was the impetus for, or justifies, your abusive spew at her...nice try though...

instead of addressing the base argument that people with strong anti-social tendencies can and do in fact conspire socially for the purpose of personal gain, you chose to justify your aggressive responses by making a semantic argument based on highly disputed and largely undefined criteria that is so vague and outdated it isn't even used in diagnostics any longer...talk about being "chock-a-block full of shit"...really very sad crank...can't you see your pathology here?

as far as patterns are concerned...lets look at yours...

Crank and nora
Crank and gski
Crank and Ms A
Crank and Alice
Crank and TZ
Crank and GD
Crank and cent

and it almost always seems to be YOU who starts with the vile crap Crank...why is that?

this guy has put some great (although, most aren't) movies & music together

this one's poignant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DuLU4x0SLY

in case you need cheeing up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHa2WGgtMzI

and toni
i'm thinking of starting up an ouzo party
but not much will get done
we'll just smash plates
& burst balloons

600 count egyptian cotton threads

http://samsedershow.com/comment/reply/5712

Quote of the Day
"He's more powerful than the entire Republican National Committee. He has a better e-mail list, he has better ideas, he's a better communicator and he's more in touch with what people think."

-- Pollster Frank Luntz, quoted by the New York Times, on Newt Gingrich.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/us/politics/13gingrich.html

toniD's Ya Think?

I see the Blog Titans are battling again.

It's still grumbly and rainy outside, so I expect this war will continue unless I bleed a goat and hold it's carcass up to the sky, or something.

I'm gonna have a cup of less violent, very strong java, instead.

If it helps, I can leave the coffee grounds outside in a dish as an offering, along with some melon rinds and whatever dog hair I sweep up this morning...

*yawn*

"this machine kills fascists"

hurry!
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