"Character is critical - Do Not Confirm Geithner"
Whitehouse: mailto:president@whitehouse.gov
Senate-Reid: http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...
House Minority Leader John Boehner has compiled a useful list of "fun facts" about the House Democrats' $825 billion "stimulus" bill. For example:
• The House Democrats' bill will cost each and every household $6,700 additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.
• The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.
• President-elect Obama has said that his proposed stimulus legislation will create or save three million jobs; this means that this legislation will spend about $275,000 per job. The average household income in the United States is $50,000 a year.
• The House Democrats' bill provides enough spending -- $825 billion -- to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700.
• $825 billion is enough to give every person living in 'poverty' [even as the government defines it] in the United States $22,000 - or every person in Ohio $72,000.
Almost one-third of the so called tax relief in the House Democrats' bill is spending in disguise, meaning that true tax relief makes up only 24 percent of the total package -- not the 40 percent that President-elect Obama had requested.A country's poverty rate should decline as real incomes rise and living standards increase, but the U.S. poverty rate has remained stagnant, says D. Sean Shurtleff, a policy analyst with the National Center for Policy Analysis. For example, Census Bureau household data show:
> In 1968, the official poverty rate was 12.8 percent, meaning 25.4 million people were considered poor.However, household consumption indicates that basic living standards have improved significantly. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the poor actually consume about $2 for every $1 dollar of reported income. How is that possible? The discrepancy is due to unreported or underreported income, savings, credit and welfare benefits.
> In 2007, the poverty rate was 12.5 percent, and 37.3 million people were considered poor.
A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, founds that luxury goods that few could afford in 1968 are now standard in most households, including 'poor' ones:
I am standing in a queue waiting to buy a train ticket from London to Canterbury. A well-dressed lady standing behind me informs her friend that she ‘can’t wait till Israel disappears off the face of the earth.’ What struck me was not her intense hostility to Israel but the mild-mannered, matter-of-fact tone with which she announced her wish for the annihilation of a nation. It seems that it is okay to condemn and demonize Israel.
One of my young colleagues who teaches media studies in a London-based university was taken aback during a seminar discussion when some of her students insisted that since all the banks are owned by Jews, Israel was responsible for the current global financial crisis.
This shocking anti-Jewish bigotry and violence – according to the Community Security Trust, Anglo-Jewry is in the middle of the worst outbreak of Jew-hatred since records began a quarter of a century ago, with more than 150 incidents across the country recorded since the beginning of the Gaza war -- has erupted in Britain as a direct result of the British media and political class giving the impression that the Israelis are deliberate child-killers...
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It seems that all of the UK's catering in the past to Islam is not enough, as the National Health Service has thought of a couple more ways to appease the Islamic community.
The NHS has put out a 66 page document called Religion or Belief: a Practical Guide for the NHS. One of the changes that will be made is that there will be no more alcohol served at staff meetings because it might offend Muslims.
I am still waiting for just one Muslim to come out and say what other people do around me is not my business.
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A local Sikh woman sued the Internal Revenue Service this week, alleging that the IRS violated her religious freedom by prohibiting her from wearing a small ceremonial knife to her job as a revenue agent. The lawsuit, filed in Houston federal district court on Tuesday, states that the IRS fired Kawaljeet Kaur Tagore in July 2006 because she refused to take off her kirpan, a knife.
[a little tricky; normally when you're on the company's time your actions aren't yours and you do as they say or walk ('at will employment') - but when it's a government agency all things become political...]
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Apparently, if one calls an Arab-American an A** H*le, Reuters and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee want all Americans to know that this is to be considered a "violent hate crime." At least that is what it seems when looking over the very lose and sloppy definition of "violent hate crimes" in a recent story on the falling numbers of such crimes against Arab-Americans in the U.S.
While ostensibly a good story -- discrimination against Arab-Americans has decreased -- it is still odd that Reuters allows this Muslim advocacy group to define even name calling as a "hate crime" and "violent" at that. So many levels of behavior are categorized under the rubric "hate crime" here that it really makes a mockery of the term, if one is even disposed to accept such a term in the first place.
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Nato is suffering from 'enlargement fatigue' and has no will to admit Georgia or Ukraine, according to Poland's foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Mr Sikorski, who is a leading contender to become Nato's secretary-general when the Alliance selects a new chief in April, told The Daily Telegraph that membership for both countries was a "fairly distant prospect".
['enlargement fatigue' my ***. It's cow-towing to Russia, plain and simple. I.e., a "Gas in our lifetime" moment.]
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KIEV -- Ukraine needs new talks to improve the terms of last week's gas agreement with Russia, a senior aide to President Viktor Yushchenko said Friday, raising fears of new gas supply disruptions to Europe.
The deal, reached by Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, came as a relief for Europe after a two-week cutoff in Russian gas supplies...
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The welfare state is the embodiment of Government failure in modern Britain. Hugely expensive, gripped by bureaucratic paralysis, riddled with fraud and abuse, it represents an oppressive burden for working people who have to pay for it but receive little real support in return. At the same time it promotes mass idleness and fecklessness by lavishing rewards on those who contribute nothing to society.
[ah but it permanently guarantees votes to the party that hands out the cash...]
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The article below reports on one of the key reasons why the bank bailout is failing and will continue to fail.
When the government distributes money, it does not do so on the basis of economic calculations—not even bad economic calculations. Instead, it distributes the money on the basis of political expediency, in an attempt to placate various pressure groups.
See, for example, Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank's admission that he engineered a Treasury bailout of a small Boston bank because it was owned by blacks.
The whole article describes how the Treasury Department's disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars is degenerating into a contest between the congressional delegations of various states to see who can pressure the Treasury to send home the most pork-barrel money...
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Zimbabwe is in an economic mess because its totalitarian leader decided the best way to maintain power was to reshape the national economy according to the passions and fads of his people, says Schlomach:
You've heard it here, there and everywhere in the news media - the time is now for a big-government economic stimulus package, not only to revive the economy, but to salvage America's crumbling infrastructure.
That's one of the selling points used over and over again by pundits, as they are paraded out repeatedly on broadcast and cable network news programs - that so-called "shovel-ready" projects will challenge economic woes by revitalizing something we need to do anyway. But only 3 percent of the Obama stimulus plan is slated for such projects.
CNN was so pleased with Zakaria's commentary from last Sunday that they re-ran it on Thursday afternoon to counter House Minority Leader John Boehner's advocacy of tax cuts to boost the economy.
In the noon hour Thursday CNN re-played Zakaria's commentary from the top of his January 18 show, in which he denounced the tax cuts as
...according to a recent Rasmussen Poll, there's one change that only 41% of Americans can believe in - manmade climate change. That's down from 47% just nine months ago, and before moving the country down an unpopular green-paved road to disaster, the "unity" promising freshman president would be well advised to understand why.
For starters, the rapidly expanding number of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) dissenting international scientists, many rising from within the alarmists' own ranks, has thoroughly shredded the misleading fallacy of "consensus." And a full decade sans warming and concluding with pronounced cooling despite ever-rising atmospheric CO2 levels has left Green House Gas (GHG) force-feeders with frosty egg on their faces. [snip]
And yet, this IPCC report, much-hyped-and-hallowed by alarmists and media-drones alike, represents the combined work of only 52 carefully cherry-picked UN scientists. But the 231-page U.S. Senate Minority Report containing the IPCC-countering findings of more than 12 times that number (over 650 dissenting -- including many current and former UN IPCC -- scientists) is either gratuitously ridiculed or all but ignored by these same agents. And last year's Manhattan Declaration was similarly impressive in its signatories, and similarly mistreated by alarmists and their hand-puppets throughout the green-entranced MSM. [snip]
When in fact, even were consensus a foundation of science, there exists infinitely more that Al Gore, James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Joe Romm, Kevin Grandia et al are snake-oil salesmen than of any anthropogenic impact on climate. And recent claims of a vaguely worded on-line survey with a 30% response rate from unnamed "scientists" being touted by the alarmists as proof otherwise change nothing.
So 59% of Americans aren't buying it; climate experts across the globe aren't behind it; yet the alarmists continue to sell it and Democratic politicians remain steady customers...
[it's going to be a battle royal, as the recent election has proved to many {likely not least of which he elected} that, with the media on your side, all things are possible. I.e., it'll be up to us - arm yourself: long but highly referenced, Highly Recommended >]
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Washington - President Obama on Monday will direct federal regulators to move swiftly to grant California and 13 other states the right to set strict automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.
The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and marks a sharp reversal from Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions [and thereby segment the market into unmanageable pieces to further accelerate an industry's demise we're already spending billions to rescue. Brilliant.]
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California
Monday’s Washington Post touted on page A3 how "Californians Shape Up as Force on Environmental Policy," over three large pictures of liberals Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer. Something amazing followed: the word "liberal" is never used in the piece to describe them. (Pelosi merely is pressed to "find common ground between conservative and liberal Democrats.") Reporter Lyndsey Layton’s feat began in paragraph one:California Democrats will assume pivotal roles in the new Congress and White House, giving the state an outsize influence over federal policy and increasing the likelihood that its culture of activist regulation will be imported to Washington.
Layton also found a liberal political scientist to suggest moderation will follow:Barbara Sinclair, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the Californians are pragmatic and mindful of overreaching. "All these folks really want to make policy change," she said. "On the other hand, they very, very much want to stay in power."
To complete this act of journalistic servility to the California liberals, Layton quoted from a telephone interview with Senator Boxer, but the sophisticated reader would wonder why the Post would need a phone interview to solicit the press-release quotes that were offered:"Californians coming, they don't have to rewrite the laws. They just have to enforce them. It's like the EPA has been asleep for eight years. The Californians are coming to wake the sleeping beauty."
Only liberals would see an entrenched regulatory agency as a "sleeping beauty."
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Since 2000, California's job growth rate has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration, says Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow at Chapman University.
All of this suggests a historical slide of California's role as a bastion of upward mobility:
[for clarity]
Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show, January 16
I got a request here from a major American print publication. "Dear Rush: For the Obama [Immaculate] Inauguration we are asking a handful of very prominent politicians, statesmen, scholars, businessmen, commentators, and economists to write 400 words on their hope for the Obama presidency. We would love to include you. If you could send us 400 words on your hope for the Obama presidency, we need it by Monday night, that would be ideal." Now, we're caught in this trap again. The premise is, what is your "hope." My hope, and please understand me when I say this. I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, "Well, I hope he succeeds. We've got to give him a chance." Why?... I've been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed.
If I wanted Obama to succeed, I'd be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he's talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the US government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don't want this to work. So I'm thinking of replying to the guy, "Okay, I'll send you a response, but I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails."… Why not? Why is it any different, what's new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what's gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it?
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